“When I read Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s clever, complex, funny novel about divorce, lack of fulfilment and middle-aged malaise, I remember thinking that it would be a nightmare to adapt for TV,” said Carol Midgley in The Times. “Well now they have,” for Disney+. And while it’s not perfect and too long (eight episodes), they have done a pretty fine job.
Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes excel as Toby and Rachel Fleishman, a New York couple who have just been through a divorce, in which their two children were caught “in the spittle-flecked crossfire”. Toby embarks on “a dating-app shagathon”, while Rachel “goes Awol from a posh yoga retreat”. At times you think, “Oh, please, stop your first-world-problem whingeing: you’re rich, you live in Manhattan, you have a house in the Hamptons FFS.” But that’s part of the pleasure, and it all unfolds with “great wit”.
This is a “clever, intricate, mostly persuasive story of marital emasculation, money, status anxiety, midlife burnout and lost potential on the Upper East Side”, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. It’s pretty watchable, but marred by an “endlessly yapping voiceover” that may lead you to panic: “Is the entire story just going to be read to us?”
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I was really looking forward to this adaptation, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, and found it disappointing. “As a casual watch it’s good fun, but it runs out of steam,” and we are forced to spend far too much time with Eisenberg, who “has only one mode: confused”.
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