Season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ended with Midge and Susie stranded on the pavement at the airport, dumped by Shy Baldwin and his manager Reggie Harris after Midge made jokes alluding to the singer’s homosexuality during a set at the Apollo. As much as anything else, Season 4 is about Midge picking up the pieces of her life in the wake of that betrayal. Her reputation among her fellow comics is ruined, she’s deeply in debt without the money from going on tour with Shy, and her personal confidence is shaken if not shattered. So Shy’s return to the show in episode 5, “How to Chew Quietly and Influence People,” is no small event.
It’s made even more tumultuous by the circumstances of that return, as Shy flies back into New York for a wedding to his girlfriend, Monica. While it sounds odd at first for a gay man to be marrying a woman, it makes sense when taken in the context of the period Mrs. Maisel is set in. Gay marriage wasn’t legalized in New York until 2011, and going back over 50 years to 1959 takes being gay from a point of legal contention to an active crime.
Shy’s marriage is a sham, his relationship to Monica designed to dispel any rumors of his homosexuality while also looking good for the papers. He says as much to Midge when he comes out to her in Season 3, and confesses the same again when they meet in the washroom at the wedding. But he puts on a good show, singing a love song to Monica titled “City Lights.” It’s a sweet ballad describing a couple’s experience across New York and Europe, and how the singer sees his love more clearly than the lights of any skyline.
None of that would be remarkable if not for a single line, barely even a sentence, that Shy drops at the end of the song. He mentions the song was written by “his boy Reggie Harris,” before going on to wax poetic about their youth. The song being written by Reggie recontextualizes it entirely. While Reggie covered for Shy and made sure nothing bad happened to him, he was fired to make sure no links to Shy’s past and those who knew about his homosexuality remained. It seems unlikely that he’d write a love song solely for the purpose of maintaining Shy’s masquerade for his ladylove.
No, instead it’s far more likely that the song is written to Shy, with Reggie as the original singer. Shy is a much more heartfelt target for Reggie’s affections, with the manager tearing up at the end of last season as he talked about Shy having to hide who he was. It also makes sense as a song written after the pair’s tour across Europe, a journey Monica wasn’t there for. There’s no guarantee that Shy is the subject of the song, but one last detail from Season 3 makes it all the more likely.
In “Kind of Bleau,” the sixth episode of the third season, Shy comes out to Midge, before she hustles him back to a hotel in time for his show. Instead of his regular set, he abruptly changes his song choice, singing instead “No One Has To Know.” The song was created for the show, and its lyrics describe a hidden love, which Shy croons about while staring meaningfully into Reggie’s eyes. Season 4 simply has Reggie returning the favor, writing a song for Shy. That song getting turned around to cover Shy’s secret while Reggie is booted unceremoniously is emblematic of the pair’s overall arc, and a subtle reminder of everything Shy’s been forced to turn his back on just to survive.
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