MEdia: Finding Myself in Toby and Rachel Fleishman

Gaining perspective and language for knowing myself better

I have been on a very deliberate trajectory with my MEdia posts, but I just finished watching Fleishman is in Trouble and it is consuming me in a way that I did not expect, so these words have to get out. Julia Sugarbaker is going to wait a month for her time in the spotlight. I found myself in this show in multiple places and I need to write about it right now. 

When I was I think five episodes in, I texted my friend Matthew to ask him if he’d seen it and he sent me a post that he wrote about it. I’m pretty sure that was the reason I added it to my list way back in January, and I echo everything that Matthew says here. Exceptional acting, nuanced and surprising story beats, deeply relatable. Go read his post. It’s a lovely jumping off point for this show that got far fewer accolades than I feel it deserved.

The TV Show That I Cannot Stop Thinking About

The story follows Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a 40-something year old doctor who is recently divorced from his wife Rachel (Claire Danes). They have two kids, Hannah (Meara Mahoney Gross) and Solly (Maxim Swinton). One day, Rachel drops the kids off at Toby’s at 4AM without any prior notice or indication of where she’s going. Toby commiserates with his friends Libby (Lizzy Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody) about his wife’s selfishness and how hard it is to co-parent with someone who doesn’t seem to care about her kids. 

On its face, it’s a show about divorce and being middle-aged. And it is about those things. But it is about those things with a depth that I have never actually seen tackled in a television show. I saw myself in both Toby and Rachel in ways that caught me completely off guard. Heavy spoilers to follow, so if you haven’t watched this show, you might want to do that before going forward.