Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a doctor in his forties, just got divorced. Among the virtues of his new marital status is one factor he didn’t take into account: his wife, Rachel (Claire Danes), might consider her $300,000-a-year income chump change for the well-to-do in Manhattan, but for the rest of the world In the real world, his job as a doctor is a magnet for picking up women on dating apps. But when he assumes he’s in for a summer of co-parenting, weeks of uncomplicated intensive sex, his ex doesn’t stop by his new apartment, far from the Upper East Side, to pick up the kids (Maxim Jasper Swinton and Meara Magoney Gross). Suddenly, his hot summer with the broken air conditioning becomes a headache as worries, responsibilities and obligations pile up.
Going beyond the starting point would hurt Fleishman is in trouble and especially the viewer experience. It can only be anticipated that, among the main characters, there are Fleishman’s two childhood friends, Jews like him, who are Libby (Lizzy Caplan), who has a stable life with her husband (Josh Radnor) and their children far from Manhattan, and Seth (Adam Brody), who has always been the eternal golden bachelor: with a gift for people, well paid, better connected and with an allergy to commitment. It is Libby, in fact, the narrator of this work, a decision that is not circumstantial, since the points of view are important in a narrative partly about the capacity of the human being to focus on their problems while being unable to look around or of trying to understand who is next to him.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner had written the best-selling Fleishman’s in Trouble when she began receiving offers from studios and production companies to adapt her novel. There was one aspect that caught her attention: everyone promised her that she would respect the material, but none of the executives considered that she could write the series herself. So, with his ego hurt, he accepted the offer of whoever he thought could create the television version of Fleishman is in trouble: the FX channel, now owned by Disney (and for this reason it is broadcast by Disney in Spain), used to producing of quality fiction (The bear, for example, is his).
He does a splendid job. The footage maintains a certain literary quality with the presence of the narrator and how this look shapes how we perceive the story. At the same time, it structures the story, the plots, the twists and deals with the themes naturally. It is also appreciated that, having such a specific sociodemographic perspective, it does not try to compensate with the appearance of subplots or the need to parody the status of the characters: it is a story about wealthy, Jewish, urbanites and with university studies in elite institutions and who, consequently, have a very specific perspective on the problems of adult life.
The result is a miniseries about the crisis of the forties that, in reality, is shown as the manifestation of the omnipresent crisis that the human being lives by the fact of existing, only this time characterized by the individual’s ability to stop for a moment , look around and consider to what extent professional, sentimental, family and intellectual objectives have been consolidated. Could dreams come true? And, if you have reached that desired status, are the foundations strong enough to sustain stability and, furthermore, feed your soul until the end of your life?
It is also noticeable that Brodesser-Akner got the cast he wanted: Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Lizzy Caplan, Adam Brody and Josh Radnor are exactly the actors the characters required. This means that all of them walk through the common places of their respective filmographies but squeezing their talent to the maximum, while talking about divorce, the frivolity of high society, our individual and non-transferable relationship with work (or if this is a vocation that can annul our lives or not), of paternity and to what extent we can be horrified by the values ??that we transmit to our children depending on the place where we live and other topics that should not be revealed and that are possibly the most stimulating for us. the production.
It must be recognized that Fleishman is in trouble has a defect: in the last few minutes he has trouble deciding how he wants to end and, taking into account his plots and characters, he says goodbye with a not very daring, lackluster note, which does not finish off the hot topics. . But don’t let this inaccuracy in the final creative shot mislead anyone: this is an outstanding portrait of adult life (New Yorker, Jewish, wealthy) that, without abandoning its spirit of intellectual comedy, ventures into most stimulating dramatic terrain. .
