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Taffy Brodesser-Akner is one of my favorite journalists. Their profiles of Hollywood stars are often masterful. Many have gone viral, because we like nothing more than someone who really knows how to see and tell you a character. Often, nothing bothers them more than when it does.

Brodesser-Akner's latest viral profile is of a fictional person. Toby Fleishman, the protagonist of Fleishman is in trouble, was born in a novel and now lives in a series. Brodesser-Akner signs both, proving that he also knows how to write screenplays. What a bastard.

Fleishman's Toby is in trouble, the series, is played by Jesse Eisenberg. Choosing him as the protagonist is as risky a decision as letting a novelist turn her own book into a script. But in this series both decisions are right. With the face of the unfriendly Eisenberg, Fleishman's proposal becomes even more sophisticated. His recently divorced forty-something is a wretched man we pity and an idiot whom we too would abandon.

The Taffy Brodesser-Akner series, available in Spain on Disney+, is about divorce, but it is not History of a marriage, a film with which one would instinctively compare it. Fleishman's premise is in trouble is much more concrete and at the same time tremendously conceptual: Rachel (Claire Danes), Toby's ex, leaves him with the children overnight, without giving more explanations than the basics. They are also his and this time he will have to keep them a little longer than agreed. Rachel's non-explanations take Toby out of his supposed young divorced heaven (you know, Tinder and more Tinder) and plunge him into a pathetic spiral of jealousy, insecurity and reproaches. As if it were a crazy mix of Search Party and Lost, Fleishman is in trouble is a story about complicating life.

It's easy to fall into the trap of not believing that Toby and Rachel (or Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes) could have ever been in love and happy. Their chemistry in the series is very strange, their dynamics are sour and their emotional barriers are evident. And that is precisely what Fleishman is talking about, to insist that things are as we want them to be, not as they are. It soon becomes clear to the viewer what Rachel wants and what Toby wants. What she expects from life (indeed: what she demands of him, because she has worked hard to achieve it) and what fills him are incompatible things. But they love each other and love can do everything, you know.

Well, no: love can't do everything.

Fleishman is in trouble is not a dramon. It's also not a lighthearted series. What counts is bitter and, above all, absolutely recognizable, even being, as in History of a Marriage, the pure definition of the problem of the first world. This is the story of an idiot and a genius. Or that of a narcissist and a vixen. Or that of a saint and a narcissist. Or that of two very wrong people. Or all at once (everywhere).

According to The Trust Project criteria

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  • Hollywood
  • Disney
  • Series