Fleishman Is in Trouble is a zippy treat of a show that asks viewers to consider softball questions such as: Do we really know anyone? Including ourselves? When we reflect on the events of our lives — the ones that happened today, the ones that are continuing to unfold since whatever age we were when we first grasped that we exist in relation to others — how well do we understand those events and their meanings at the time? In retrospect? How much time has to pass before we can assign meaning to those events and see where they fit into the many decades of our life stories? What is the truth of the stories of our lives?
TV delivers a visceral narrative experience that’s particularly well suited to a story about disorientation and feeling unmoored, akin to being on a roller coaster that is also a carousel spinning a little too fast. That’s especially true of Fleishman, which was created, produced, and written for television by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from her own 2019 novel of the same title.
Following a credits sequence that’s a queasy upside-down version of the opening of You’ve Got Mail, we first see the titular Fleishman as he greets the day by swiping through the many messages and come-ons he’s received overnight via one of the dating apps his younger colleagues installed for him some months ago. The array of options is overwhelming; images of woman after woman, breast after thigh after ass cheek, all surrounding and flowing around him like a zoetropic sex buffet. Good morning, indeed!
A more immediate and unpleasant reality intrudes, dropping us into the ostensible reason that the story is being told in the first place; Rachel Fleishman (baseline: ambitious and frazzled; age: 40ish) has unilaterally broken the terms of her custody arrangement with soon-to-be-ex-husband Toby (baseline: sad and horny; age: 40ish) by dropping off their children Hannah (baseline: dismissive and fuming, age: 11) and Solly (baseline: sweet and anxious; age: 9) in the wee hours of the morning one day earlier than normal so she can snag an extra day at the late-summer yoga retreat she’s been planning to attend prior to taking the kids to the Hamptons the following week. Toby is pissed. He’s lived the last 15 years according to Rachel’s demanding schedule and is beyond over it.
After a nasty little snipe-fest with Rachel, Toby shifts into custodial-parent gear: breakfast, summer camp drop-off at the 92nd Street Y, dodging the performatively sympathetic hot yoga moms, and heading into work at St. Thaddeus Hospital, where he is a senior attending hepatologist. Work is such a pain in the ass, but when parenting proves messy and difficult, work can be a time-out where we can restore our tissues by being competent at something. Anything! Fortunately for Toby, he is very competent at his chosen profession. We get to see him being a caring, attentive, and accurate diagnostician and to hear Jesse Eisenberg deploy his most withering “I’m Mark Zuckerberg, and you are only entitled to the minimum amount of my attention†voice as he reads the riot act to a patient’s internist for having been so inattentive as to mistake the signs of her rare liver disorder for garden variety mid-40s depression.
Is it possible, though, that Toby has committed the same error as that unfortunate internist, repeatedly over a 15-year period, with his own wife? He reminds his young fellows that they have to pay attention to every word a patient says to them, that health insurance won’t pay for more than a 15-minute consultation, so they must take note of and ask follow-up questions about seemingly unimportant details to properly understand and diagnose their patients. But Toby didn’t do that in his earlier conversation with Rachel.
He was too annoyed, too preoccupied with resentment and the desire to strike back, so didn’t hear her fully. He’s so used to Rachel’s work commitments expanding and engulfing more hours, more evenings, more entire days that he can only complain dismissively about her, sighing “she does this†repeatedly to his beloved college pals Libby (baseline: incisive and flailing a bit as “a New Jersey housewifeâ€; age: 40ish) and Seth (baseline: a little douchey, but in a thoughtful way; age: 40ish).
Ah! Yes, Libby and Seth. Let’s back up slightly. As part of the separation process, and on the advice of his therapist, Toby got back in touch with them after a 12-year hiatus. Over regular lunches throughout the summer, the trio has been renewing and recementing their decades-old bond. Concurrently, Libby has been steeping in an unnameable and not entirely explicable dissatisfaction with her whole deal.
Libby — a former celebrity profile writer for a glossy men’s magazine that we should absolutely not think is GQ, where Brodesser-Akner worked as a celebrity profile writer prior to moving to The New York Times Magazine — is restless. Getting an eyeful of the “bevy of interested sexual partners that comprise the underlayer of this city†that Toby can select from in the apps shifts something in her brain. There’s a story there, and she can’t help herself from telling it, so she does, in a bravura performance providing the series’s voice-over.
Voice-over is a high-wire storytelling device. It’s so easy to do badly, but done well, a voice-over adds dimension and subtlety, provides exposition with a lighter hand than dialogue, and occasionally undercuts what we’re seeing onscreen, making us feel off-kilter and needing to pay closer attention. Voice-over is also another layer between us and the story itself, able to retrospectively highlight and obscure details that may or may not be important later. Of course, it calls attention to how voyeuristic viewing is, implicating us in the process.
It’s wildly seductive to be drawn into a story this way, though. The invitation to surrender the responsibility to analyze and interpret, to allow ourselves to be borne along in the waves and swirling eddies of Libby’s narration, is hard to resist. Libby’s voice is reminiscent of Brodesser-Akner’s own, which she’s deployed so effectively in her profiles of people like Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Hiddleston, and Jonathan Franzen: wry, knowing, fond, tart, personal. The instant, presumed intimacy of Libby’s narration gives us close-up access, placing us right inside Toby’s meanest thoughts and basest actions while inclining us to forgive them. He’s been through so much; he’s at sea emotionally. After years in the soul-crushing wilderness of his unhappy marriage, he’s getting, as Libby says, “a sense of possibility returned to him,†which is both wonderful and destabilizing. We can give him some grace in those unfortunate, graceless moments, right?
So Libby is telling us Toby’s story. Or, despite her protestations to the contrary, it might turn out to be her own story. That’s messy and complicated and we’ll (possibly, maybe) sort it out over the course of the series. In the meantime, we’re seeing Toby’s story unfold and loop back on itself and then move forward again through Libby’s immersive narration and commentary.
Libby’s inviting, conspiratorial style seems unvarnished and candid, but I keep reminding myself that we aren’t seeing uncut documentary footage — we’re watching an artfully crafted story unfold from a skilled storyteller, from her very specific point of view. This true story is not necessarily the true story, a concept that both the book and the show call into question through metaphors like the theories of relativity and the block universe. Is there a singular truth? Yes and no. We feel that there must be one, but what that truth is depends on how much we see and from what angle. Relativity strikes again!
As the weekend progresses, Rachel’s unexplained absence continues into Sunday evening, threatening both her dinner-and-a-show plans with Hannah and Toby’s follow-up date with Tess (baseline: more sex, please, she’s British; excellent taste in lingerie; age: 40ish). It doesn’t occur to Toby to follow up on his realization that he hasn’t heard from Rachel at all since early Friday morning until Hannah plaintively wails, in the final moments of this episode, “Where is Mom??†Yes, where is she? Perhaps more important: How is she?
Assorted thoughts:
• A quick word about the inescapable nouveau Woody Allen-ness of Fleishman. It’s baked right into the series’ tone, location, and font highlighted in all of the promotional materials. (For my fellow font obsessives, Allen uses Windsor Condensed Light. Fleishman’s font is a very near match; I believe it’s Windsor Condensed.) I hypothesize that the font selection is an acknowledgment of Allen’s oeuvre as an ancestor of Fleishman. I do note with some relief that, whatever his other issues, Toby is only interested in women close to his own age.
• I love the score, especially in the opening sequence. Its skittery, anxious strings generously laced with pizzicato evoke the score of The Royal Tenenbaums, another story about a New York family teetering between fractious, loving reunion and total collapse and, not for nothing, featuring a voice-over (by Alec Baldwin).
• In the novel, Libby is forever cataloguing the parade of slogany tank tops that haven’t aged well. This week, we’ve got “Boss Bitch,†“Rosé all Dé†(a little at odds with the yoga mom wearer, who probably talks a lot about “eating cleanâ€), and the inevitable “Rise & Grind.â€