Fleishman is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It’s bad. In fact, it’s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn’t even seem to understand who the most interesting character in the series is.
Dr. Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) is a successful hepatologist at a New York City hospital who is somewhat recently divorced from talent agent Rachel (Danes) when, after a weekend when he has their two kids, she fails to come pick them up at her assigned time – and the next day, she’s not only still AWOL, she’s unreachable. This becomes the catalyst to explore the history of their now-defunct marriage, Toby’s experiences as a single guy, and his friendships with Libby (Lizzie Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), whom he’s known since they all spent a semester in Israel during college.
Libby is the narrator, and the stand-in for the author, and we also get a fair amount of her story as well. She’s married to a safe, boring lawyer (Josh Radnor), with whom she has two kids and shares a nice house in the Jersey suburbs. She was working as a writer, but quit about two years before the events of the show to become a stay-at-home mom. With Toby getting a divorce and living it up as a single guy, while she finds the other stay-at-home moms to be incapable of having a modestly intellectual conversation, she falls into an existential crisis of her own.
The way the series unfurls, we get mostly Toby’s perspective for the first six episodes. Rachel is derisive towards him, even in front of friends; consumed by her work; and diffident towards her kids. In his telling, she’s all of the problems, and he comes to believe she was also unfaithful to him with a mutual friend. Only some of this is accurate, although when we get more of her side of the story, the result is we realize he’s also kind of an ass. Blame may not be shared equally, but neither of these two is free from it. By the time the final episode began, I hated them both, with Eisenberg more or less doing the Mark Zuckerberg character from The Social Network and Danes hitting one very loud note over and over.
Toby, it turns out, is high on his own supply, probably exacerbated by the success he’s having on dating apps. (Jesse Eisenberg is listed at 5’7”. He would not be doing that well on the apps in real life.) He and Rachel have differing memories of pivotal events in their marriage, including a traumatic scene around the birth of their daughter, and when Rachel develops post-partum depression with psychotic elements, Toby, a medical doctor, recommends … a support group. Not a psychiatrist, or anyone who could prescribe something. It’s hard to fathom, but it also may be a sign he really doesn’t take his wife seriously at all. She, meanwhile, is a very thinly drawn stereotype, the embodiment of the myth that you can’t be a successful working woman and a good mother together, which is especially odd in a series that depicts the alternative, stay-at-home moms, as vapid robots who walk around with an unearned sense of superiority and refer to a certain style of interior decoration as “mid-cench.”
Which brings us back to Libby, who should have been the star of the series (and, I presume, the book). Caplan gives the one truly good performance of anyone here, and it’s partly to her credit and partly because Libby is the only three-dimensional character. The winter of her discontent should have been enough to carry the movie, without the pointless mystery of Rachel’s disappearance (which gets an answer, but in a very unsatisfactory way). Libby is 41, with two kids who are approaching the point where they don’t need her like they did probably two or three years prior, and no longer has an active career. It’s the age and the point in life where feelings of regret over past choices you can’t unmake and the closing of future possibilities just due to age and circumstance are common. It’s a midlife crisis. It shouldn’t bother you, but it does. And Libby is aware of this, on some level – she knows her life is, if not great, solidly okay, and privileged, and even that she has unusual agency to make things better for herself. She even has the agency to choose to leave it through divorce, if she wants. The series isn’t interested enough in going deeper with her character, instead spending time with some of the worst sex scenes you will ever see as we follow Toby’s adventures in dating. There are some good parts of the Libby story, with one episode that’s primarily dedicated to her, but for every bit that’s telling (the freezer) there’s one that’s absurd (the pancakes).
The cinematography in Fleishman is a disaster too; the series relies way too much on a spinning camera gimmick that wasn’t just overused, but was nauseating, and that added nothing whatsoever to the story. It becomes the series’ crutch any time it needs to speed up time, or try to show a character’s confusion, rather than just doing so via dialogue or narration. I’ve seen action and sci-fi films/shows that were less reliant on camera movements, and can’t remember feeling like I had to turn away multiple times to avoid getting disoriented myself. This is supposed to be a realistic story, and all this gimmick does is detract from that.
The ultimate failure of Fleishman, though, comes down to where it rests its eye. The story puts us in a tiny niche of society – a very narrow subset of upper-class Manhattanites, where almost everyone around Toby and Rachel is a social climber obsessed with status and money, getting their kids into the Right Schools and using the right decorators and so on. (I was glad to see Ashley Austin Morris, who played Francine on the Electric Company reboot, appear as a side character; she doesn’t have a lot to do, but she does it well.) The script substitutes character quirks, like having Toby on some sort of weird keto or paleo diet for his entire adult life, for real depth, to the point where we don’t get to know any of the principals, let alone empathize with them beyond Libby. Caplan gives by far the best performance of anyone in the series, which makes it even more galling that the story doesn’t center her character outside of one episode, and even at that it’s never quite explained why Libby puts up with Toby when he’s consistently horrible to her. Libby is in Turmoil would have been a much better series, and then she could have just introduced Toby and Seth as her jerk friends.