by Jeff Alan, Contributing Writer
Gender roles. Midlife crisis. Class anxiety. Marriage and divorce. These are just a few of the many topics and themes that come up consistently in FX’s new miniseries Fleishman is in Trouble. On top of some heavy hitters in the cast like Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody, this adaptation of the 2019 novel holds a lot of intense looks into the lives of three friends who – while all in different places in life – come together and attempt to find the answers in many issues plaguing their middle age lives.
Based on the novel of the same name, the Fleishman is in Trouble miniseries drops us right in middle of 2016 with Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) discovering his independence after his recent divorce from his workaholic wife, Rachel (Claire Danes). He begins frequently using casual dating apps at the rise of their popularity to hook up with women now that he is a single man. Everything is not well and good, however. He is forced to move out of his beautiful home on the Upper East Side in New York City, and takes residence in a less glamorous apartment in the same part of the city. His kids have become distant with him — namely his daughter Hanna (Meara Mahoney Gross) — and he has thrown himself into his job as a hepatologist. The one good thing that has come out of this – besides his newfound sexual awakening – is the rekindling of two close friendships in Libby and Seth (Lizzy Caplan and Adam Brody). They meet up, vent about their relationships and family lives, and reminisce about the good old days when they were coming up.
One day, Toby wakes up in his apartment to find that his kids were dropped off by Rachel in the middle of the night while he was sleeping, a day earlier than he was supposed to have them. This ends Toby’s plans into a tailspin, and he is forced to put everything on the back burner to find ways to keep his kids busy earlier than expected. As the weekend is wrapping up and tensions are high between him and his kids, he has still not heard a single word from Rachel about when she is going to be picking them up. Call after call goes to voicemail, her assistant hasn’t heard from her, and the location she said she was going to won’t give out any information on if she is checked in or not.
As a week drags on without any sign of life from Rachel, the kids become impatient and remind Toby of promises Rachel made to them that Toby can’t fulfill, like a trip to the Hamptons and plans with friends. Even buying his daughter her first cell phone doesn’t buy him enough good will with Hanna to make her happy with him for long enough, because she attempts to call Rachel with no luck, and blames Toby for leaving her
Days later, he tearfully sends his kids to summer camp and embraces the idea of fully finding himself as a single man. But after an impromptu picnic in Central Park with Libby and Seth, he starts to grow worried that something bad has happened to Rachel, and he has a full-on manic episode. In his daze, he runs into Rachel’s snobby rich friends who tell him that they ran into Rachel in the park earlier that day, leaving Toby lost for words and led to believe that Rachel doesn’t care at all about her family she has abandoned.
When I first started the series, I was more interested in the disappearance of the missing Fleishman and the cause of her departure, but it’s made apparent as the first few episodes progress that this show takes an immediate deep dive into the complexities of marriage, the journey of finding yourself in your middle ages, and even friendship as you get older and navigate through your 30s and 40s.
We don’t only see this Toby’s point of view, but through the eyes of Libby, a stay-at-home, married mom who is having trouble connecting with her husband, while living their monotonous life in the New Jersey suburbs, and longing for some sort of meaning in her life, questioning her path, and struggling with artistic fulfillment. Opposite of her, we see Seth, who is living more of the single life, having issues with his job and place in life being the older man in a business of younger people, and questioning his status as a single man not having found the right person to settle down with.
While the mystery of Rachel Fleishman’s disappearance is front and center, Fleishman is in Trouble gets you pulled into these other issues and struggles, and you start to put yourself in their shoes and question your own choices in life and compare your position to the lives of them, and it all feels so real. I think that’s what this show does best is to make you zoom out on your own life and look at it in new way, maybe rediscovering passions and rekindling relationships with people, or looking inward and finding long dormant things about yourself that you want to bring to the surface.
Score: 8/10
Fleishman is in Trouble is currently streaming on Hulu.
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