The inevitable title card fills the screen: four years later. But—what’s this? She’s even happier than she was at the wedding, all but laughing to herself as she floats through a Technicolor Manhattan park in her mauve hat and matching swing coat, orders lamb from a friendly butcher, delivers cookies to her doorman and elevator operator, collects her lovely children. The colors are saturated, and the music is lush, beautiful, and square: Barbra Streisand, Peggy Lee, Anthony Newley. The whole production seems piped in from a Hollywood soundstage of the 1950s, when a very different formula reigned, and the lives of haute-bourgeois young matrons were seen as worthy subjects for private fantasy and mass entertainment.

Midge’s husband, Joel, is an executive at some vaguely defined company, but he nurtures a small, impractical dream: joining the stand-up comics reshaping the art from vaudeville yuks to culture-shifting explorations of self on the sticky stages of Greenwich Village. He’s convinced of his talent—incorrectly so, it is immediately apparent—and Midge assists with a notebook full of comedy musings and homemade brisket to barter for a good stage time at a subterranean club called the Gaslight Cafe. “What would I do without you?” he asks, his face filling with wonder.

At this point the creative team behind the show—Amy Sherman-Palladino, who dreamed it up, and her husband, Daniel Palladino, who is an executive producer—would seem to have painted themselves into a corner. They’ve created a character, mid-century housewife, whose fate, as per the Feminist Archetypes Congress of 1966, is sealed: Only unhappiness will follow her all the days of her life. Midge must fall in the mud and then rise on her own, without that stupid husband of hers. She’s the funny one, not the preening, unoriginal Joel; the Gaslight audience is meant for her, not him. Does that mean they’ll force us to leave this beautiful world of mid-century fantasy, of inflexible gender roles and orderly domestic rhythms that brought us to the party? They will not—or at least, not really.

Because Midge will spend the series having the two things that women can’t have in combination: a secure and unexamined place within what we now call the patriarchy, and a self-constructed, convention-breaking career. The genius of the show is that it allows her to enjoy both the best of the glamorized 1950s and the best of today without any of the difficult, inevitable trade-offs and transitions that women have spent the past 60 years navigating.

Getting rid of Joel is a bit of business so essential to the plot, it is performed in the most perfunctory way possible. One night after an argument, he announces that he’s leaving. Why? Not because of one soap-opera reason, but because of all the soap-opera reasons: He’s bored, he hates his job, he hasn’t become the man he wants to be, and he’s having an affair. With that, he closes up his suitcase and departs.