‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’s Latest Episode “Me Time” Is a Work of Art

From its first episode, Fleishman Is in Trouble has told the same story: A divorced father has to pick up the pieces after his ex-wife mysteriously disappears, abandoning him and their children. It’s a story this series has told masterfully through its electric performances, full embrace of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s elegant prose, and inspired cinematography. And as this week’s episode “Me Time” reveals, it’s a story that’s always been, on some level, wrong. Fleishman Is in Trouble‘s second-to-last episode is a stunning work of art, an installment of this rich series that not only turns its central narrative on its head but makes us, the audience, complicit in its biased crimes. Spoilers ahead. 

Written by Brodesser-Akner and directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, “Me Time” picks up at the end of “This Is My Enjoyment.” After weeks of hearing her college friend complain about his ex-wife, Libby (Lizzy Caplan) stumbles upon Rachel (Claire Danes) in the middle of a park. Initially, Libby approaches Rachel with a level of trepidation reserved for wild animals. But the more Libby makes an effort to actually see Rachel as a person, the more her guard falls. What follows is a recap of this entire series told through Rachel’s point of view.

It’s an episode that’s fluid on nearly every level. As the flashbacks jump wildly through time, Rachel’s egregious sins morph from clear violations against Toby (Jesse Eisenberg) to forgivable mistakes. The job offer that morally offended Toby was little more than a friend trying to return a favor. The Passover week with Toby’s parents she missed wasn’t evidence of her commitment to money and materialism; it was the measured sacrifice of someone who was drowning under too many commitments. Rachel’s obsessive need to network her kids was less about socially leveling up and more about manically trying to ensure their children never felt as abandoned as she once did.

On and on it goes. Every grievance of Toby’s has an answer from Rachel. Not all of them expunge her of her crimes, but all of them are humanizing. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the revelation that Rachel was medically violated during the birth of her first child, Hanna (Meara Mahoney Gross). That’s where her emotional distance came from. That, compounded by her chronic stress and being abandoned by two men who vowed to love her was why she eventually disappeared. “Me Time” paints the portrait not of a negligent mother, but of a woman in the midst of a mental breakdown.

It’s rare for an episode of television to work as seamlessly as this one. Claire Danes gives a performance that is both the best of her career and one of the strongest of 2022. Filled with guttural screams and haunted expressions, she transforms Rachel’s pain into something visceral. These moments of intense emotions are perfectly complimented by Faris and Dayton’s directorial work. The pair utilize the perfect combination of quick cuts, uncomfortably long closeups, and hazy camerawork to pull you into Rachel’s disjointed mental state. That is to say nothing of Brodesser-Akner’s undeniably gorgeous words or Caplan’s equally snarky and sympathetic delivery. What’s left is an episode that’s so deeply human, simply watching it feels like a privilege.

It would be one thing if Fleishman Is in Trouble simply released a stellar episode. There are a countless shows on TV, and a lot of them are capable of a great episode here or there. No, what elevates “Me Time” is how this one hour of television fearlessly upends the six hours before it. It would be a fool’s errand to try to summarize Brodesser-Akner’s work better than the master herself, so I’ll let Libby take it away:

“I had spent the whole summer listening to Toby’s stories, seeing it through his eyes alone, that I had forgotten an essential truth of reporting, which is that you should always wonder when you’re hearing someone’s version of things what the other person in the story, the one who wasn’t there, would say if he were,” Libby says in her voiceover. “I had forgotten that lesson, which I had learned on every story that I ever did. It was that there were no real villains in life, not really. There were no real heroes either. Everyone is great, and everyone is terrible, and everyone is flawed, and there are no exceptions to that.”

That’s the true story Fleishman Is in Trouble has been telling from the beginning. It has never been one about parental negligence, abandonment, resentment, or martial problems, though it has contained all of those themes and more. Instead, this has always been a story about the vastly different ways we see each other and what happens when that chasm is too steep to overcome. In that way, it may be one of the most universal stories of all.

The last episode of FX’s Fleishman Is in Trouble premieres on Hulu Thursday, December 29.