“Television is a great place,” author Taffy Brodesser-Akner said about making the FX series adaptation of her novel Fleishman is in Trouble. Taffy’s debut novel became a New York Times bestseller and the TV rights were quickly snatched up, with the author getting to adapt her own work, serve as an executive producer, and also take the lead as showrunner. The eight-part series kicks off with a double-episode premiere on Thursday, November 17th, exclusively on Hulu. Taffy reunited with her fellow executive producers and the stars of the series during a recent press day, revealing how Fleishman is in Trouble went from the page to the screen (A video interview with Taffy Brodesser-Akner us included at the bottom of this story).
(Matthias Clamer/FX)
“Taffy's an insane quick study,” revealed executive producer Sarah Timberman about the author’s ability to quickly learn how to rearrange the elements of her novel, told in three parts, into eight episodes, learn how TV shows are produced, and lead the project. “ Sarah and her producing partner Susannah Grant had wrapped production on the Netflix series Unbelievable when the book fell into Sarah’s lap. “It is so bursting with humanity and insight and a sort of voracious appetite for life. And just uniquely honest portrayals of friendship and marriage, and it defies cliché or categorization. It’s not like anything, and so we both read it, and we were so excited, and we thought that, of course, she had to adapt it, and so she did.”
“She's so fast,” added Susannah Grant about Taffy’s workflow. “You give her an idea, and she's going to chew over that for a couple of days. And you'd wake up in California, and there'd be the fully fleshed-out version of this thing that was just a notion the night before.” It didn’t take long for Susannah to decide that Fleishman is in Trouble was the right project for her and Sarah to tackle next. “I read about the book, and I thought, ‘I’m going to read this book, maybe I’d like to adapt it.’ And then I got four pages in and said, ‘Yeah, I want to make it, but nobody can write this but her.’”
“At first, I didn’t think I could do it,” Taffy confessed. “I didn’t think that it was an option for me to do it, and then I have Sarah and Susannah over here calling me and saying that only I could do it, and I cannot tell you how short a distance it took me to believe that. And from then on, I would hear of nothing else. I feel like this story was so much a part of me. It was my first book, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything like it again, and I wanted to do everything. I would have held the boom if the union had let me. I was lucky to have people who are so supportive. FX thought it was a good idea. ABC Signature thought it was a good idea. I’m waiting ‘til it airs before I ask those people hard questions about why they thought that was a good idea, but I was very lucky to have a lot of trust placed in me, but it has a lot to do with Sarah and Susannah and their long history of making great things and taking incredible responsibility for people like me.”
(Matthias Clamer/FX)
The series includes an all-star cast, with Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes starring as the recently divorced couple at the center of the story. “Our characters are viewed from each other's perspectives,” Eisenberg explained. “When Claire is viewed from my perspective, she appears ambitious to a fault, vindictive, negligent, and then when the show flips perspectives and you see me from her point of view, you have similar feelings towards me. One of the challenges that we faced was modulating how villainous and how heroic we are as actors. Goodness, sympathetic to make our characters or how kind of aloof to create our characters when you're in the perspective, the other person's perspective. So that was a very interesting challenge. Sometimes we would do scenes, then simultaneously do scenes from different perspectives and have to make these small modulations to try to have that effect.”
Toby Fleishman’s ex-wife Rachel is not an instantly likable character, but Claire Danes had already read the book and knew where the character was heading when the project came her way. “ I was doing reshoots for [The Essex Serpent] and reading this book when the offer came in,” Danes revealed. “So I was literally in a corset reading this, getting lost in between setups in this other story, a book that my best friend insisted that I read, actually bought for me with real urgency. It all felt a little cosmic and I didn’t choose it. It chose me, and I was already a big fan. So, it was an easy yes.”
Adam Brody’s character Seth, Toby’s longtime friend and a bit of a playboy, may not have scenes that approach the level of discomfort that Eisenberg and Danes endured, but he connected with the overall tone. “There's a definite melancholy to the whole show and book,” Brody shared. “I feel that about life, and I feel like as you get older and you're in your 40s, you're still asking the questions about who you are and where do you want to go, and you're still at a crossroads, and you still have a lot of lessons to learn, things to discover, and it's not just for people in their 20s.”
(Matthias Clamer/FX)
Like the novel, the series is narrated by Toby’s friend Libby Epstein, portrayed by Lizzie Caplan. “As audiences, we’re so willing to forgive a man in a family environment before we are willing to forgive a woman,” Caplan shared about the roller coaster of perception her character takes viewers through. “This whole show is gray area and nuance. Nobody is all the way good, and nobody is all the way evil. There are no heroes. There are no villains. It’s a very interesting time to try to tell a story like that in this day and age where everything is black and white. Everything is your team versus my team. Even in film, there’s the caped hero and the dirty villain. This is what we can process as a society right now, and that’s just not how life is. It’s not how people are.” Being the narrator also meant that Lizzy Caplan had one of the final jobs for an actor on the show. “I just finished last week the real tracks in the booth, and it was very sad to say those lines for the last time to where now I’m like texting Taffy, and I’m like, ‘Um, so the audiobook…’ I didn’t want to say them for the last time.”
For Taffy, hearing Lizzy Caplan recite the words she wrote and add her own artistic nuances to the character of Libby was very emotional. “The first time we ever heard her say any of the voice over, I burst into tears,” the author confessed. “Lizzy does such a great job with the voiceover, and she makes it into something that isn't drone of storytelling but its own character aside from the character that she plays, which we all loved.”
You’ll fall in love with Fleishman is in Trouble when it premieres exclusively on Hulu with two episodes on November 17th and subsequent episode releases on Thursdays through December 22nd.
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