There’s a very specific moment in life when there are people who still worry about finding an antidepressant that doesn’t affect their libido. It is at this point that several of the main characters in Fleishman are in trouble. The story of this Disney+ miniseries is so concrete and raw that in a matter of weeks it has mesmerized a small army of viewers who are inevitably challenged by its protagonists’ succession of crises. It’s the niche series of the season.
The original premise of the story revolves around Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg), a doctor with an idealistic calling who recently divorced Rachel after 15 years together. She’s a workaholic theater agent obsessed with success and social advancement in grueling Manhattan who thinks more about escapades in the Hamptons than her own everyday happiness. But one night she disappears, leaving her two young children in the care of her ex-husband. The chaos begins for a man who has spent weeks rebuilding his life using the novelty of dating apps and the comfort of past affinities.
The series is particularly inspired as it expands on the context- and naturalness-charged dialogues between Toby and his two lifelong friends, Libby (Lizzy Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), who have recently been reunited after something so normative, yet so upheaval in marriage is, she separated them for years. The trio, in that lethargic state of someone who has just hit forty, unaware that he has left his happy twenties, is the polytonic voice of a generation.
As in the novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the screenplay of which she herself adapts in eight episodes, the viewer needs patience to discover the half-hidden discourse in the small big odyssey of a character who at first only a few well-known literary icons and a Cinema, needless to say, that of the neurotic New York Jewish heterosexual male. The big twist in the script is taking the point of view of the supposed protagonist. Fleishman is in Trouble gives clues when he chooses an external and female voice as narrator, that of Libby, a writer, the alter ego of the author of the text, who without knowing very well has transformed into a suburban housewife, who lives fascinated by the recent life change of her friend the good doctor.
And after the brilliance of Lizzy Caplan, Claire Danes reappears in an infamous and transcendent Chapter 7, embodying the woman on the run who appears in the first few episodes only as a reminder of a bitter breakup. With the same talent that raised Homeland to the altars of top television, the actress brings infinite nuance to this portrait of a middle-aged and middle-class whose ambitious character condemns itself.
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