ABOVE AVERAGE

I was getting impatient with this miniseries an episode or two into the story. What irritated me was how it made it seem like going on dating apps and making zero effort to create an attractive profile was no obstacle to meeting busloads of women who were willing and able to fuck your brains out. That’s the situation that Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg) finds himself in. I did wonder if this is some kind of satire. Indeed, there’s a lot more to this story than first meets the eye.

Ending a marriage after 15 years
The marriage between Toby, a hepatologist, and Rachel (Claire Danes), a talent agent, has fallen apart after 15 years. They now have shared custody of their kids, 12-year-old Hannah (Meara Mahoney Gross) and 9-year-old Solly (Maxim Swinton). While Toby is finding great success on his dating apps, he also reconnects with old friends, Libby and Seth (Lizzy Caplan, Adam Brody).

The divorce affects Toby’s kids greatly, and when he realizes one day that Rachel seems to have gone missing after leaving the kids with him, his life becomes very stressful.

Learning the background
At first, we sympathize with Toby a great deal. He’s a good guy under great pressure. His daughter seems to have inherited her mother’s worst instincts, constantly annoyed that Toby won’t just give her anything she points at, constantly embarrassed that dad doesn’t fit in naturally among Manhattan’s elite. Now Toby’s left on his own, a seemingly very attractive doctor, with sole responsibility for the kids, chasing a promotion at work. We learn the background, how Toby and Rachel met and fell in love, not realizing that they were a bad fit because of very different ambitions and perspectives on life.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner wanted to have a little fun with our culture’s tendency to identify with a male perspective

As the story progresses, we slowly realize that we’re being had. Were this a simple Hollywood thriller, there’d be a big twist where we find out that the hero is a villain and his opponent a victim. But this is a much more realistic story and things are not that simple. What happens is that over eight episodes we are taught the value of different perspectives and that there are rarely heroes and villains in a marriage. At the end, we can still nurse an opinion on whom to trust more, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who created the miniseries and wrote the novel behind it, her first, does her best to do everyone justice – and offer a much-needed feminist point-of-view. Brodesser-Akner wanted to have a little fun with our culture’s tendency to identify with a male perspective, making it so easy to understand Toby and his situation. A less skilled writer couldn’t have handled the latter part of the story so well, finally making us understand Rachel and see Toby’s worst sides, without turning him into some monster.

In the middle of the storm stands the writer’s alias, Libby, who becomes drawn into the collapse of the Fleishmans’ marriage, as well as also being its observer and the narrator of the series; much like Brodesser-Akner she’s a magazine writer who struggles with her new life as a wife. The characters all get separate episodes where the actors get to shine, and they deliver forceful performances, especially Danes who’s equally convincing from Toby’s perspective as in that harrowing episode where her postpartum depression takes full control of her.

At the same time, this is also a funny experience, an examination of competitive and angst-ridden Manhattanites, and a rich portrait of the concept of marriage. There’s hardship, compromise, a dash of spite… and also undeniable love.

Fleishman Is in Trouble 2022-U.S. 425 min. Color. Created by, novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Cast: Jesse Eisenberg (Toby Fleishman), Claire Danes (Rachel Fleishman), Lizzy Caplan (Libby Epstein), Adam Brody, Meara Mahoney Gross, Maxim Swinton… Christian Slater. 

Trivia: Originally shown in eight episodes, some of which were directed by Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton and Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini (they all also co-executive produced).

Last word: “There’s a line at the end of the book, which I think is also in the series, that says, ‘Toby would come close to self-awareness and then run screaming from it.’ My first reaction had been that the guy is completely self-aware, but I realized that he has a sense of righteousness that clouds him from being self-aware and seeing his own contributions to the fraught in his marriage. That was interesting to me, because I don’t think of myself that way. I think of myself as not only very self-critical, perhaps more than is healthy, but I blame myself first in a situation.” (Eisenberg, The Hollywood Reporter)