The travails of the self-obsessed Manhattanite has been a staple of the screen all the way back to a pre-cancelled Woody Allen. The genre now rides again with Fleishman Is in Trouble (Disney+, streaming from Wednesday). Adapted from the 2019 Taffy Brodesser-Akner bestseller about a recently divorced doctor, it stars Jesse Eisenberg as the titular Toby Fleishman. He’s a familiar archetype: a 41-year-old man-child struggling for self-actualisation amid the hell of upper-middle-class life.
But the series is also a sly commentary on male privilege, with Fleishman’s story relayed from the perspective of his old college friend Libby. She’s a magazine journalist turned homemaker watching the world from the unbearable suburban purgatory of middle-class New Jersey. For her, fortysomething life is a tale of quiet disappointment; for Fleishman it’s a twirl of casual dating-app sex and embittered texts to his ex, who vanishes without a trace towards the end of the first episode. Libby doesn’t want to swap places. Still, as Carrie Bradshaw might write, she couldn’t help but wonder which of them was really going through a midlife crisis.
The idea that men wildly act out their fortysomething breakdowns in front of the world while women suffer theirs off camera is fascinating. Sadly, Fleishman is too busy being tart and quirky to take the time to properly consider the subject. As is the way with the milieu, it is also wildly pleased with itself. Characters serve as mouthpieces for such trite lines as “When we get married we have no way of understanding what forever means.”
As Fleishman, Eisenberg serves up a twist on his familiar shtick as the unravelling man-baby. Claire Danes lands the thankless part of his perpetually grumpy former wife, Rachel. The only sympathetically drawn character is Lizzy Caplan’s Libby (a loose stand in for Brodesser-Akner, whose day job is with the New York Times magazine).
To its credit, Fleishman Is in Trouble reveals previously unhinted-at depths when we flash back to Rachel. She’s a successful Broadway agent with a frosty veneer that is gradually revealed to be hiding a profound depression. Maybe it’s down to Danes’ bone-weary performance, but she is also the one member of the ensemble who feels like a genuine human being.
Just like the novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble will entertain those eager to breathe deep of life in chattering-class Manhattan. Alas, like dinner-party guests who overstay their welcome, the superficial charm quickly loses its lustre. Long before the end you’ll be fed up with these privileged Americans and their fuel-injected narcissism.
