It has become an increasingly common caveat to even the most enthusiastic of TV recommendations. “You must watch X!” a friend, who wishes you only happiness, says. “It doesn’t get going until episode two or three – but after that it’s great!” With an eight-episode series, this is the equivalent of being told you must plough through the first 80-130 pages of the new bestseller before your investment begins to be rewarded. This would be a cheeky stunt for an author to pull, but television gets away with it quite often – perhaps because the effort it takes to watch is so much less than reading.
So, let’s deal with the maths for Fleishman Is in Trouble, adapted for the small screen by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from her 2019 novel of the same name. This one only really gets going in its seventh episode (a rough correspondence with the book), when it performs the original’s outstanding pivot, which could be seen as testing an audience’s patience to the limit.
What saves it, however, is what saved the novel: namely that the first part is so good, you don’t feel like you’re missing anything. Critics of the book could make the same objections here – that the reveal is too late and rushed, and I certainly wish Brodesser-Akner had felt able to unveil it sooner. But, having had time to digest the whole series for a while now – I demolished it in as close to one sitting as life these days allows, because it is as addictive as it is perceptive and surefooted – I realise that any disappointment I’m feeling in the aftermath is simply the comedown. The reward for sticking with it is so much better than expected that when it’s over you feel a bit hard done by. I suspect any viewer that says they feel disappointed by its conclusion is actually feeling the discontentment of a spoilt child. Fleishman is almost too much of a treat.
It is the story of Toby Fleishman’s (Jesse Eisenberg) divorce from his beloved but increasingly ambitious and difficult wife Rachel (Claire Danes) after 15 years of marriage and two children. The (crucially non-omniscient) narrator is his great friend from college, Libby (Lizzy Caplan), married with two kids herself and semi-consciously living vicariously through Toby and his new sexual freedom, entangled though it is with loss, pain and bitterness.
It all starts when Toby wakes one morning to discover Rachel has dropped off the children overnight at his apartment for their weekend together and become unreachable by phone, email or anything else. At first he assumes this is just another instance of her thoughtlessness and lack of maternal instinct, but suspicion and anxiety grow as days stretch into weeks and they receive no word from her.
As we gather hints and clues and wait for the mystery of Rachel’s disappearance to be resolved, Brodesser-Akner anatomises – with endless wit – just about every possible modern malaise. She mercilessly skewers the luxury habits treated as unassailable rights by the moneyed Manhattanites among which the Fleishmans move (but can never truly be part of because Toby’s job as a mere doctor means his salary tops out at $300,000 per annum). She dissects the divisions of domestic labour, the lies about marriage, the damage done by the “happy ever after” myth, the melancholy of midlife and the truths about motherhood. It’s all here – from the “greed is good” mantra no longer being a shocking slogan but an embedded philosophy to the different ways in which a man can be lauded and a woman abused. An occasional moment to allow you a chance to pop your head above water and take a full breath before being swept away again would be welcome, but to wish for it would also be the kind of quibbling that the hateful school ‘n’ stay-at-home moms with whom Rachel must silently scream through coffees would adore.
Fleishman Is in Trouble adheres to one of the animating principles of the book – that women’s stories need to be Trojan-horsed into people’s consciousnesses via ones that are apparently about men. It is an unexpected and delightful realisation that things have changed enough, in televisionland at least, that this aspect (amid the timelessness of the rest) feels very slightly dated. Maybe we’re in less trouble than we were? Maybe.
Fleishman Is in Trouble is on Disney+ now.
