[imagesource: FX Networks / YouTube]

The adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s best-selling novel Fleishman Is in Trouble has been lauded as the best new TV show of the year.

The smart new Hulu limited series premiering on November 17 teases out the myriad contradictions about the human condition, centred on a group of friends all having their own form of a mid-life crisis.

There’s a failed marriage, a sad sack 40-something man (Jesse Eisenberg) and his missing career-bulldozing wife (Claire Danes), philosophical walk-and-talks, money, and lots of sex.

The Daily Beast, which called the show the best of the year, writes that the plot is too expansive to synopsise as it “plumb[s] its subjects’ individual and interpersonal depths, investigating the cause-effect dynamics that gave rise to their hopes, fears and reactions”:

The initial few episodes (out of eight) make Toby’s perspective seem like the truth, but over time, Rachel is given “considerable and compassionate space to also tell her side of things”.

All while Lizzy Caplan’s Libby (Toby’s college-era friend, ex-journalist, stay-at-home mom, and also the show’s narrator) struggles with ennui and Adam Brody’s Seth (un untethered finance dudebro) searches for stability.

Overall, Fleishman Is in Trouble contends with all the issues of being an emotional, conscious being in this modern world:

As they flounder and flail about in smart and stupid directions, Brodesser-Akner’s series pings from one breathtakingly astute observation to another, be it about marriage (which is both a beginning and an end), divorce (and the way it not only taints the present and the future, but also the past), or growing old.

That last inevitability proves most troubling for Libby, since it means coming to grips with the fact that youth’s infinite opportunities are all but completely gone—and, consequently, that she must find a way to be happy now that longing, desire and possibility have given way to contentment and stasis.

The stellar performances are bolstered by the “roster of excellent directors” which includes Little Miss Sunshine’s Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton.

CNET also commends the profundity of the ‘Smart Marriage Post-Mortem Like No Other’:

The novel, so interior and so cerebral, seemed at first an odd choice for the streaming TV treatment. But somehow the show pulls it off, giving the viewer that same joy of picking up what an astute writer’s putting down.

Brodesser-Akner’s masterful series does a fine job of capturing the messy complications and contradictions of the modern human condition.

Bring it on this Thursday.

[sources:dailybeast&cnet]