In “We’re Going To the Catskills!,” the fourth episode of the second season of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s mid-century period comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we learn that Miriam “Midge” Maisel, a housewife-turned-comedienne in 1950s New York City, has won a summer bikini contest eight years in a row. Midge, played with carbonated speed by Rachel Brosnahan, is not only a champion, she’s a demolisher of records. Every year, the Maisel family spends two months at the Steiner Resort in the Catskills Mountains, and every year, Midge dominates the social scene there. She’s the ingenue everyone wants to dance with, the wife every husband wishes he had, the woman who looks just a bit better than the rest in a gingham two-piece. In other words: Midge is nearly superhuman. She is infinitely capable. She can do anything. Canonically.

This bawdy broad with a bulletproof facade, as scripted by Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, has turned out to be one of the most popular, and most controversial, television characters of the year. It is difficult to say exactly where we are on the critical parabola with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but it is safe to say we are hovering somewhere between the backlash and the backlash-to-the-backlash stage. The first season of the show, which debuted in November 2017 (after Amazon released the pilot, to a rapturous reception, earlier that year), was a bonafide smash. The show won four Emmy awards in 2018, including for Best Comedy Series and casting, as well as statues for both Brosnahan and Alex Bornstein, who plays Midge’s broke, tough-talking manager.

I will admit to being a part of this first wave of excitement for the show—I profiled Brosnahan for the New York Times Magazine last year. I was immediately drawn in by the swingy period costumes and set dressing, as colorful as a Funfetti cake, and by Brosnahan, who gave (and continues to give) as star-making a performance as I had seen in years. Her take on Midge—the snappy phrasings, the forceful pertness, the almost desperate overdose of pluck—had the irresistible hamminess of a classic comedic stage performance. She wasn’t doing television, she was doing Vaudeville. No matter where opinion tends to be on the show, critics seem to agree on Brosnahan’s sheer charm offensive—she is carrying the show, yanking the material upwards with her like a girdle.

And yet, for many, the show’s schtick, no matter how much moxie Brosnahan brings to the table, is beginning to wear thin (or never caught on in the first place). In her recent review in The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum panned the series, saying that she found it equally cloying and impenetrable, like an angel food cake covered in a hard fondant shell. For her, the show is too polished by half—the character of Midge included. There’s no vulnerability there, no bending to the world as it tries to break her down, no revelatory moments of hand-wringing self doubt. Sure, Midge has her frictional moments as she ascends through the ranks of the stand-up world (though most of them are external—misogyny from comedy club owners and a swelling rivalry from another woman comic—and not caused by any fault of her own), but she seems to breeze right through them with unflappable forward momentum.

Most people who try comedy take months, if not years, to perfect their stage set. But the first time Midge ever tells a joke into a microphone, she kills. In the first season, I experienced her sui generis success as a triumph; it wasn’t necessarily something she had earned with hard work, but she did source her punchlines from a very real font of personal suffering. When the show opens, Midge, aka Miriam Maisel, has a “perfect” life: a yawning Upper West Side apartment, a husband who wears a suit and hat to his office job, two healthy children under the age of five, and a robust social life that includes calisthenics in hot pants and putting together children’s goodie bags with her perfectly coiffed, platinum best friend (whose pastel outfits and bristly lack of humor are to be read as signs that she is a gentile). Midge has a quick wit (she delivered the toast at her own wedding, making a joke about shrimp that made the Rabbi gasp) but somehow never feels bored by preparing brisket to bring to the owners of a comedy club where her husband tells jokes (that he has plagiarized, by the way). She has a closet full of jewel-toned swing coats and cinched-waist cocktail attire that made her look like Grace Kelly playing a fashion editor.