Sherman-Palladino’s own father, Don Sherman, was a comic right out of the borscht-belt old school. After he died in 2012, she started to think about how she might honor his legacy by telling stories about his world — Lenny Bruce would come by the house when she was a child, and though her family lived in L.A. by then, she grew up hearing war stories about the New York stand-up scene. She began to think about setting something in the world her father rattled around in, the dank Village clubs of the ’60s. But instead of following a grizzled comic through the haze of two-drink minimums and chance encounters with Jack Paar, she decided to showcase a much less examined life: that of a normal woman, alone under the hot lights, slinging zingers for pay.

It is this belief in Midge’s normalcy — that she was just like every other wife putting a steak dinner on the table before she was not — that ultimately makes her a radical character for television right now. Her comedy doesn’t come from a deep well of insecurity; it comes from a brazen moxie that she cannot explain and never realized had a viable outlet until she stepped onstage. At this turbulent moment in show business, when many men — especially comics — who were praised and protected as icons are being revealed as harassers, creeps and criminals, what we thought of as a linear narrative of progress is being rewritten. We are seeing how many talented women were forced to diminish themselves or give up in the face of misogyny, particularly in comedy, where being a successful woman is so often tied to making the boys in power laugh.

“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” has a swirling, magical-realism quality to it. It begins with a wedding — Midge and Joel’s — at which, naturally, Midge insists on giving her own toast. She is a woman who has enjoyed every privilege: couture clothes, the full spread at Zabar’s fish counter, a palatial apartment in her parents’ building. One striking scene from the pilot follows Midge as she does her nightly beauty routine, waking up twice in the middle of the night, once to remove her makeup and again to put it back on, so that her husband always wakes up to a perfectly done face. When Joel leaves Midge, the shock is seismic. She has never had to work, or even struggle with her own self-image. This is why her revelations are so primed for comedy: She is a woman who fully believed she deserved the moon, and when her perfect facade disappears, she’s apoplectic and confused and ready to rant.

Whenever Midge’s jokes really hit, it is joyful and electric to watch. Women have the right to claim, and reclaim, a place in stand-up comedy history. There were always women working the circuit, even on the borscht belt — like the 1960s club regular Belle Barth, who sold millions of comedy records. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” provides a vehicle through which to engage and recover their stories all over again. Because Midge doesn’t start out on a crusade, she almost smuggles progress into the world; like many women navigating midcentury lives, her success is mounted like an undercover operation.

“What I love about Midge is that she is so not a feminist,” Brosnahan told me. “She’s a creature of her time.” Midge Maisel is doing what she needs to do to get ahead in a man’s world, which is its own kind of quiet, lesser-told revolt. “What she is,” Brosnahan continued, “is curious. She’s insatiable. If she doesn’t know things, she wants to know them. And she doesn’t know any other way than forward.”

The “Maisel” set sits on a cavernous soundstage at Steiner Studios, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Because Amazon ordered two seasons (the streaming service’s first immediate renewal, based on the strength of the pilot alone), the production designer Bill Groom’s intricate replicas of 1950s New York will stay in place until next spring, when “Maisel” goes back into production. Sherman-Palladino and Palladino wanted to shoot on location as much as possible, but so little of the midcentury metropolis remains intact. The crew hung a scrim the length of a city block painted with apartment buildings at night, each glowing window illuminating a different urban tableau. There is one closed corner of the set, strictly off-limits to outsiders: the box that houses the Gaslight Café. The creators don’t want strangers to watch while Brosnahan is doing stand-up. The only people allowed in are the extras in beatnik dress and a handful of crew members. In early episodes, for sound-editing purposes, she had to deliver her act to a silent crowd.

I watched Brosnahan film a domestic scene from the seventh episode, in which she and her pert platinum friend, Imogene, played by Bailey De Young, are stuffing goody bags for a children’s birthday party inside her parents’ posh apartment. The scene was simple enough: Sort toys into bags while gossiping about Midge and Joel’s separation. But the number of props was overwhelming. There were dozens of period-appropriate trinkets — Tiny Tina baby carriages, Silly Putty, Bazooka Joe — and the women had to place them into each bag in a precise order, all while firing off rapid, breathless dialogue. It was the final shot of the night, and Brosnahan had already been cinched into a corset for six hours. Her brain was mush, she told me, “because we’d already shot 40 pages of dialogue that week,” but she attacked the scene with laser intensity as the two began shuffling knickknacks around.