I couldn’t help but think about the 80’s movie Dirty Dancing when watching this particular episode. The quirky part is that this version seemed to portray the entire process as a far more silly and frivolous affair instead of something people genuinely did for fun and relaxation. I can’t imagine that there was as much tongue-in-cheek snark in the 50’s when trips to the Catskills were in vogue.
Of course I’ve got worse complaints about the show’s characters and the seeming non-differentiation of their individual voices…
I also watched Diner earlier in the week, and while very far from being my favorite film, it had a more nuanced portrayal of 1959 culture than Maisel has had. Of course Barry Levinson (b. 1942) actually had the experience of living through the 50’s compared with Amy Sherman-Palladino (b. 1966) who didn’t. She obviously has a drastically different lens.