#‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Creator on Deciding to End With Season 5, How Saying Goodbye Is the “Hardest Thing in the World”

[This story includes minor spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season five.]

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino wanted to make sure that the cast and the show’s audience felt satisfied with the characters and where they end up at the end of its fifth and final season.

“We want to make sure that like everybody walked away from this feeling fulfilled and that their characters got what was coming to them,” Sherman-Palladino tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Then, we throw up a few other little surprises that we had been talking about and toying with if we went longer, and we thought, ‘Well, we’re not. Let’s yank those back and put them in here so that everybody is in the pool.’”

Sherman-Palladino and co-showrunner Daniel Palladino went into writing the season with anchor points of where they wanted their characters to go. Amazon gave the married couple the flexibility of anywhere between eight and 10 episodes, which helped them see what they wanted to accomplish.

“We knew exactly where we wanted to end,” he tells THR. “And we just sort of like knew that these are our last markers that we wanted to hit towards the ending that we knew was going to be the ending from the very beginning.”

When it came to making the decision to end the series with season five, Sherman-Palladino says it was also important to her that everyone on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was on the same page about it ending and trekking toward the finish line together.

Knowing season five was a good place to end, however, hasn’t made saying goodbye to the cast and crew any easier, the creator explains, sharing that it’s “the hardest thing in the world.” She joked that people who say they love each other on set are lying because the Maisel team is the only group that truly loves each other.

“Our cast and our crew became family in the best terms of the word family,” she says. “I will deeply miss them, and I will need a lot of therapy to get over [it],” adding, “It’s just a weird coven, like it’s Heaven’s Gate, and we’re all gonna put on all matching shoes and lie down and, like, go up to the mother planet together, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen because they’re all working. So yeah, it’s horrible. I’m very depressed.”

Season five of the Prime Video series sees Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) inch closer than ever to the success she’s dreamed of, according to the synopsis, only to discover that closer than ever is still so far away. In the first few episodes of the final season, fans see Susie (Alex Borstein) get Midge a job as a writer on The Gordon Ford Show, in hopes of her appearing as a guest on the show one day. But it’s not long before they find out Gordon Ford has a rule that doesn’t allow people who work on the show to ever be guests on the show.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season five is streaming on Prime Video now, with new episodes dropping every Friday until May 26.