“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”.
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