Fleishman Is In Trouble: Disney+ Mini-Series Flips the Script on the Male Story
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-minus
When we first meet Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), the protagonist of the new eight-part FX series Fleishman Is in Trouble, premiering on Disney+ on Nov. 17, he’s a newly single 41-year-old Manhattan liver doctor.
Thanks to the new world of dating apps and an abundance of women open to commitment-free hookups, the life-long nerd gets to live out his erotic fantasies.
Then one night, his wife, Rachel (Claire Danes), a theatrical agent obsessed with her career and social status, drops off their children, 11-year-old Hannah and 9-year-old Solly, at Toby’s apartment, leaving word she’s headed for a spa. Instead of returning, she ghosts both him and her children.
Lizzy Caplan and Claire Danes co-star in Fleishman is in Trouble.
The series is adapted by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from her ballyhoo’d 2019 satiric novel, a sensation which ended up on numerous best-books-of-the-year lists. The book, and series, are filled with witty observations on a contemporary Upper East Side marriage breakdown, reminiscent of films by Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach.
But what excited readers and reviewers is that the novel is also an exhibition of a kind of feminist narrative jiu jitsu.
From its title on down, it evokes the late-20th Century fiction of such literary lions as John Updike and especially Philip Roth, and their stories of newly single, middle-aged men, and their navel-gazing internal monologues toward their penises as they discover the sexual revolution.
It turns out that Brodesser-Akner’s novel is not really about Fleishman at all. It’s about about the women around him carrying his emotional baggage, especially Rachel, whose absence is the story’s main mystery for the first few episodes.
Leading up to the revelation of her secret, we see how, even in these characters’ bubble of financial and educational privilege, there’s a persistent imbalance of power between the sexes. This includes the way girls are punished differently than boys for sexual transgression, how women’s bodies and minds are mistreated by male doctors and how men’s and women’s careers carry different weights.
All of it is more spritely and less solemn than that sounds. Bodesser-Akner does most of the heavy-lifting here: She’s the executive producer, show-runner and writer of all but one episode. She works with a team that includes Little Miss Sunshine’s Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton and American Splendor’s Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini.
She has created a TV series that is entirely faithful to her book, and unabashedly literary, with voice-over narration and dollops of metaphor: the regenerative power of the liver, the block chain theory that time is an illusion — you know, typical fleeting thoughts.
Our narrator is Toby’s college friend, Libby (Lizzy Caplan), in a wry voice-over that perfectly captures the tart tone of the novel. We learn, in flashback, that Toby, Libby and their permanent bachelor friend, Seth (Adam Brody) met two decades earlier as college students during a year abroad in Israel, a shared adventure that bonded them even as their lives took different paths.
The onscreen de-aging process of the actors is relatively unobtrusive. It adds to our sense of familiarity that we have seen all the principle cast — Eisenberg, Danes, Caplan and Brody — onscreen since their teens. All are well-cast here. Eisenberg is familiarly twitchily amusing. Danes, as the repressed and driven Rachel, lets loose emotionally in her later scenes.
Yet it’s Caplan, who sets the tone, and who eventually takes over the story as self-deprecating sidekick.
In the later episodes, we learn how she started out to be a magazine journalist, inspired by her admiration for a bad boy star writer (Christian Slater), before realizing that, she would never be man enough to emulate him. (Bodesser-Akner wrote for GQ, and is now is a staff writer for The New York Times magazine, where she is known for her profiles and personal essays).
Eventually, Libby ends up marrying a lawyer, Adam (Josh Radnor) and moving to suburbia to be a stay-at-home mother, wasting her story pitches and bon mots on other house moms at an interminable series of backyard barbecues.
When Toby calls her, after several years, to commiserate about his failed marriage, it sparks the desire to tell this story, eventually moving Fleishman from the center to the side as she steps forward. The result is like a long ensemble magazine profile, looking at the institution of marriage, with a resonant combination of indignation and empathy.
Fleishman Is in Trouble premieres on Disney + on Nov. 17. Created by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, with Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Lizzy Caplan, Meara Mahoney Gross and Maxim Swinton.