Fleishman is in Trouble TV Show Review: Navigating Mid-Life Crises
Fleishman is in Trouble is a Hulu TV show based on a popular book of the same name. It is a story about love, growing up, breaking apart, and all of those great things that make a life memorable and painful all at the same time. The background music mixed with the overarching narration performed by Lizzy Caplan, playing her character, Libby, makes the show feel whimsical. You get swept up into a world where everything is real, but the situation feels so jarringly improbable, that you question what’s going on and how the characters could possibly recover from it. I like the mystery of the show, as well as the deeply humanizing aspects of it as the season progresses. Overall, if you enjoy slice-of-life stories with mystery and comedy, this is definitely a show for you.
Jesse Eisenberg plays the main character, Toby Fleishman. From the trailer, you can deduce that Toby and his wife, Rachel, have gone through a divorce and are still recovering from it all. One day, Rachel disappears, and Toby has to deal with the mystery of her absence alongside their two children. What proceeds is a story about the blossoming and unraveling of a relationship, mostly centered around the unraveling. I enjoyed how this show felt like a deeply honest portrayal of how two people slowly started to drift apart due to their different values in life. I could relate to Rachel’s anxiety about money and her driven nature to ensure that she creates the best life for her family. At the same time, I could also relate to Toby’s anger and frustration with the sudden disappearance of his wife and the feeling of unfairness that he has been left with the responsibility of the household while she has supposedly gone off to focus on herself and her work. There’s a lot that people can relate to with the characters in this show, which is why it can be so intriguing to watch. It discusses the fears and struggles that we have on a daily basis as we’re dealing with relationships and the ongoing question of how to live a meaningful life.
A character who is ever-present is Libby, the narrator and Toby’s close friend from college. Towards the end of the show, we start to get to know Libby and how she’s dealing with her own mid-life crisis. I feel like her struggles are very much about feeling disillusioned with life, which is very relatable. By the time you hit a certain age, you feel like you should have accomplished this, this, and this. But it’s all an illusion of wanting things that you may never have and never feeling satisfied with what you currently do have. I feel that on a day to day basis, and it’s a hard feeling to get over, even when you are well aware of what you are doing to yourself mentally. Maybe there’s no way to fix it and it’s just a fact of life that we will always strive for more. Sometimes that striving is a good thing, because it pushes us to change and create new opportunities for ourselves. But most of the time, it is uncomfortable and scary. The most we can do is probably acknowledge that what we are feeling is very human and something we can potentially connect with others about to form deeper relationships and have better discussions. This show as an opportunity for me to re-acknowledge that, and that made it especially meaningful for me.
Fleishman is in Trouble made me very self-reflective as I was watching it. The story is very much about characters going through difficult times that challenge them and force them to grow. In a way, it’s like a coming of age story for people who are still figuring it out even though they have reached an age where society expects them to have figured it out already. We are constantly undergoing growing pains, and perhaps that is something that will never change in life. But as humans, it is a shared experience, and Fleishman is in Trouble reminds me of that.