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The series "Fleishman in trouble" claims to do so much - and is hugely successful - voila! culture

2023-02-23T06:08:15.035Z


The Disney Plus mini-series is packed with sophisticated and thought-provoking sentences and seasoned with cynical humor and heartbreaking diagnoses. And while she is waving before our eyes in the story of the hero named


Trailer for the series "Flyshman in Trouble" (FX, Disney Plus)

Tobi Fleishman is a good Jewish guy.

He has done everything that is expected of him - he is a life-saving doctor, he has a very successful wife and two smart and charming children, he has a comfortable and abundant life in the most prestigious area of ​​Manhattan.

He always stands behind his principles, believes in equality, supports women, puts his children first, in short everything that is right and proper in life.

So how is it possible that he suddenly finds himself 41 years old, newly divorced, addicted to casual sexual encounters with women from dating apps, not knowing what to do with his children, when suddenly Rachel, his super-functional ex-wife, disappears without much explanation and leaves them with him At the beginning of summer vacation?

The mini-series "Flysman in Trouble", which went live yesterday (Wednesday) in its entirety on Disney Plus, tries to understand what went wrong.

How does a person whose every aspect of his life was exactly what he always wanted, reach a point where everything goes out of his control and life drops the rug from under his feet.

This is the story of Toby Fleischman, played by Jesse Eisenberg ("The Social Network") with his characteristic neurotic grace, who loses control at the speed of a rolling snowball.

But not only Fleischmann is in trouble.

This story is also about his two best friends, Libby and Seth (Lizzy Kaplan and Adam Brody), who represent his youth, the time when there was only unfulfilled potential and the whole life ahead of him, and they also find themselves lost at the beginning of their fifth decade, unsure If they are where they wanted to be.

In a completely different way, this is also the story of Rachel (Claire Danes), his disappearing ex-wife, a woman who concentrated all these years on obtaining money and status, always preferred her career above everything, even above family and children, until Toby could not bear it more and asked for a divorce.

All these characters undergo a breakdown to varying degrees, they are all in crisis, and we the viewers experience all the moments of panic, the feeling of pressure, the loss of control, the turning of the world with them.




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A cast that compliments the wonderful and dense writing.

Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes, "Fleishman in Trouble" (Photo: JoJo Whilden/FX)

The series is an adaptation of Taffy Brodser-Ekner's successful bestseller, and she also wrote and produced the TV version.

The meticulous star cast, right down to the last guest appearances, compliments the wonderful and dense writing.

It is crammed with sophisticated and thought-provoking sentences and seasoned with cynical humor and heartbreaking diagnoses that touch everyone who feels or feels the time that does not stop, the old age that creeps up behind it, the youth that moves away from it with each passing day.



But this is not just casting a line of famous actors, but a deliberate choice to fill the screen with people we know from a very young age.

We may have grown up on Claire Danes in This Is My Life and Romeo + Juliet, or we still quote Lizzie Caplan from Bad Girls, or we fell in love with Adam Brody on The O.C., or Jesse Eisenberg will forever be The one from "The Social Network" - and suddenly we see her struggling with the 40-year-old crisis?

This probably means that it can happen to all of us, that they too, just like us, can feel lost and unsatisfied with the choices they have made in their lives.

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Our young people have grown up.

Adam Brody, "Flyshman in Trouble" (Photo: Linda Kallerus/FX)

There are some lovely surprises in the casting here, but shining above them all is Lizzie Kaplan, who finally gets her rightful place among the A-list, and of course Claire Danes, who has proven time and time again that she is one of the most talented actresses working on television today.

She comes to work and she puts everything on the table, with a game so powerful and precise that sometimes it's hard to look at her, but you can't take your eyes off her.



As mentioned, the series is very dense and has a lot to say on the surface, but it also has many messages that reach the viewers in its underground currents.

One of her main themes is the question of perspective.

The series challenges our point of view, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes it knocks us down like a block on the head.

In the first episode, Tobi explains to his son about "superposition" in quantum theory, and says that two opposite situations can be true at the same time.

The child looks at his hand with his left eye closed, then switches eyes, and the hand seems to be somewhere else.

Nothing has changed, but appearances have shifted.

The view has changed, but both situations are correct.

In other words, these two stories are different "but both are reality".




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This is not his story at all.

"Flyshman in Trouble" (Photo: Linda Kallerus/FX)

This understanding explains something fundamental to us about the series.

that even though this is Fleischman's story, even though his name is the one in the title, it is at the same time not his story at all.

He is also the main character here, and he is also the least important of the characters.

Both of these things are true at the same time.

Throughout the series we are asked to remember that everything is a matter of perspective.

There is a hint of this even in the way of photography, when the whole city turns upside down and we look at the Manhattan skyline in a way that you don't normally see.

It's a metaphor for Toby's life being turned upside down, that he feels unstable and drowning in circumstances, but more than that, it's a cue for us to constantly question the point of view and the facts as they are presented to us.



The biggest clue to this is the narrator.

When books are adapted to a visual medium, they use a lot of narration that accompanies the events, often in a very tedious and unnecessary way, because Voice Over is often used as a lazy shortcut that chooses to tell us how to feel instead of making us feel.

In "Fleishman in Trouble" the narration element is actually important, and the trick is that the narrator is Libby, Tobi's best friend.

She is used most of the time as a kind of omniscient narrator who speaks from his head, describing his experiences and his perception of the events, through the filter of his emotions.

From time to time we hear her speak from her experiences or about her feelings, but her place is very clear - she is the friend of the hero, and as in every series, the friend's role is to support him while he is falling apart, or at most to allow a comparison of his life span with hers.

In the first episode she gives us a glimpse of her life but immediately qualifies "but this is not my story".

Later on, she will actually try to talk to him about what she herself is going through,

But he will change the subject and return to talking about himself.

Libby's crisis is, at least in the first part of the series, nothing more than a background color, but that will change.



Libby is a reporter for a magazine aimed at a male audience, and even though she's been there for over a decade, she feels like she's not being counted.

"Nobody even reads what I write if it's not about a man," she says.

And this is another hint of the trick the writer did here - she "worked us" into believing that we are watching a series about a man, when the truth is different.

Throughout the series, the point of view changes little by little, until without noticing, we are more invested in the stories of Libby and the mysterious Rachel, and Toby's big crisis feels more like the whining of a guy who suffers from the "good guy" syndrome.

After all, it's very easy to judge one side in a broken relationship when all you hear is the other side's testimony.

From Toby's side, the tragedy here is that he is so fine, such a caring guy - he cares about his children, his patients, the happiness and success of his wife.

Although he always abhorred the rich culture she aspired to, he always supported her and her dreams.

The truth is, he's so fine, so bad things shouldn't happen to him!

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Finally getting the place she deserves.

Lizzie Kaplan, "Flyshman in Trouble" (Photo: Matthias Clamer/FX)

Proving again that she is one of the most talented actresses on television today.

Claire Danes, "Flyshman in Trouble" (Photo: Matthias Clamer/FX)

The story is also partly about the feelings of guilt that privileged people feel, as they are reflected in the very specific location of the Upper East Side in Manhattan, with all the set of expectations that come with this hedonistic lifestyle.

The point of view here is actually very narrow, several blocks of buildings with a doorman and high ceilings, and kindergartens where the children have to be registered at the moment of conception, and even then they will only be accepted with protection.

All the supporting characters that populate Toby's world are white, rich and privileged.

He and his friends are indeed very Jewish, but they are far from being a disadvantaged minority in the second place on earth where it is easiest to be Jewish.

These are people who apparently everything worked out for them exactly as they wanted, and they are still not happy, not satisfied, do not know how to save their souls.



The choice of this location is very deliberate, and these are not just super-New York characters, with all the usual left-wing clichés.

The series is aware of the irony that exists in that it talks about people who dare to be miserable even though their lives are supposedly so fine, so close to the perfect capitalist dream, and this is also the criticism that works of this type constantly receive.

Nowadays, looking inward into the human soul is gaining importance like it didn't have in the past, and the counter movement is to call all of this with the derogatory word "Wokeness" to dismiss the psychological digging in the search for happiness as the whining of rich leftist intellectuals.

It is clear that the creator of the series is aware of and reacts to this.

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Grab a gun and good luck.

"Flyshman in Trouble" (Photo: Linda Kallerus/FX)

Fleishman in Trouble is a work that claims to do so much, and it's a great pleasure to report that it pretty much manages to "V" all the things on its list.

By the time we get to the end of the story, she will put us through emotional upheavals, make us identify with different characters in conflicting situations, present us with a woman's story disguised as a man's story, make us change our minds about the heroes several times.



And as in life, there is no solution at the end.

There is no insight or moment of "ah-ha!"

May he bring logic into the chaos and put everything back in its place.

Everything is circular, and even though time and the plot move forward, the characters just go around in circles, and their problems have no quick fix.

Everyone is right and everyone is wrong, and everything is right and happening at the same time.

And yet, after episode after episode the director takes us on this stressful and neurotic journey, reinforcing the feeling of losing control through cinematography and screeching music, the series still leaves us with hope and a smile, with a feeling that we will survive this crisis as well.

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  • Taffy Brodser-Ekner

Source: walla

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