We get it – it’s just too much. So this year, we’re giving our editors a last-minute chance to fill in what might have been missed. Check out everything you should really be reading, watching or listening to – plus more of our review coverage from this year – here.
I don’t think my co-workers meant to offend me when they said Fleishman was in trouble It was “too old” for him. (He prefers White Lotus
. Apparently.) To be fair, the show is based on Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s best-selling 20 novel – mainly centers on a newly divorced hepatologist who’s 2019 having the worst summer of his life. (His ex-wife is missing — oh, she’s cheating on him; his chances for a promotion at the hospital are being passed over; he’s dabbling in the underworld of online dating; he’s getting into a bad two with his two kids — NYC 1 bedroom apartment in the city.) It doesn’t exactly scream “fun.”
However: Fleishman has been the highlight of my week. The show isn’t so much about the relentless disaster of midlife as it is about growing up and figuring out how the hell we got here. When Toby Fleishman (played by a thick-necked Jesse Eisenberg) tries to make sense of his current reality, he must return to the house party where he met his wife; to Israel, where he hangs out with strangers Studying abroad, these strangers became his closest friends (by the way, they are also experiencing). The whole show feels like that line from Joan Didion’s “Farewell to All That,” in which she describes the eerie way you’re young in time: “With the deceitful ease with which movies dissolve, How six months turned into eight years… I went through the revolving door at and came out much older and on a different street.” (Not without reason: I’m a sucker for New York stories, coming-of-age stories, and love-disillusionment stories.)
But there’s also some convincing confusion. We were thrilled when we found out that Toby’s wife Rachel (Claire Danes) was actually having an affair, as well as the thrill of staying up until the dawn with Toby’s banker playboy friend Seth, played by Adam Brody. Excitement (he, it must be said, has never looked better).
Fleishman The best part might actually be the women in Toby’s life. When he visits his old friend Libby (Liz Kaplan), a former magazine writer now stranded in suburban New Jersey with her husband and two children, everything looks great. But Libby, in her way, is also wondering how the hell she got here, when you get to a certain age and you look around and everyone has the same boring life – or, at least, the same boring Feeling uneasy vest. Toby’s midlife crisis almost seems to draw Libby, and she longs for her own second act.
2019
