Some Gen X Quibbles with Fleishman Is in Trouble

8 min readJan 19, 2023

January 19, 2023, 3:00 pm
Filed under: age, art, feminism, Gen X, music, TV, writing | Tags: feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Free Bird, Generation X, Millennial, Once in a Lifetime, Same as it ever was

This is going to be a regular thing now, isn’t it? This thing where Millennials play Gen X-ers now? This is going to happen a lot from here on out, I’m starting to realize.

I’d already watched seven episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble but it hadn’t been bothering me much. I was too pre-occupied with how it compared to the book and what had changed and wondering if I felt differently about it as a TV show. But then, Lizzy Caplan’s character went to a barbeque in New Jersey and the scene was just chock full of model gorgeous young Millennials and then she walked past four Millennials (or maybe Gen Z?) men, playing “Free Bird” in the backyard and suddenly the generational stuff was all I could think about.

You all are familiar with the song “Free Bird,” right? It’s a Leonard Skynyrd song from 1973. For Gen X, “Free Bird” was a joke. A literal joke. You probably could not have gone to a concert in the 80s without some joker yelling, “Free Bird” to the band in any moment of silence. And it was very clear that no one actually WANTED to hear “Free Bird.” When a band got tired of this joke and learned “Free Bird” so they could play it when someone shouted it, people laughed after the first few chords but only a sadistic band would play the whole thing. And I will confess something to you. I understood this as a joke long before I ever actually heard the song “Free Bird.” I was really surprised when I finally listened to it, honestly. “That’s Free Bird?!?” It was not at all what I expected. I was imagining an epic like “Stairway to Heaven” and it was this thin, maudlin thing instead.

Anyway, to see a bunch of young people singing “Free Bird” at a backyard barbeque in a completely unironic and earnest manner really confused me. People like this song now? This character is supposed to be 41 in the show, so she is technically an elder Millennial as the eldest Millennials are turning 42 this year but the show is set in 2016, so she’s actually Gen X, just like in the book. This Gen X character is having a fully earnest moment with the joke song of the 80s? What the hell is going on?!

So I looked up Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the writer of this book, as well as the showrunner of the show and yes, she’s Gen X. She’s 47. But — and this will be significant for cultural signifiers — she spent a lot of her youth in an Hasidic community. My girl probably had very little exposure to Gen X youth culture in the moment — which may be how this “Free Bird” situation occurred. And it may be why there’s a lot of confusing cultural and generational issues in this show. I suspect the delay in entering the pop cultural landscape might mean that she may be more Millennial than Gen X in her cultural influences.

Like, she’s telling a Gen X story about aging using iconic Millennial actors. Jesse Eisenberg is the epitome of a Millennial leading man. I’m not sure you could get a more representative actor for his generation. Maybe Daniel Radcliffe? But for American Millennial angst? Top of the list. I saw a Tweet about this show suggesting that Jesse Eisenberg grappling with middle age meant that the Tweeter, too, was facing down middle age. It becomes a Millennial middle age story in a Gen X outfit. I found the whole experience disorienting.

I wasn’t crazy about the book, as you may recall. But I hated the TV show. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to watch it. Maybe because a lot of the reviews I read suggested the TV show was better than the book? Regardless, I stuck with it, maybe just out of morbid curiosity. I suppose the curiosity was largely about my own response to it. Why do I hate it so much? And so much more than the book, too? Why am I so alienated by a show by someone, who is more or less my age, taking place in the city I live in? Shouldn’t I relate to this somehow? Is it just the bizarre intermeshing of Millennial actors and styles with Gen X dialogue and t-shirts? I don’t think so.

One of the major differences between the book and the show is that we see a lot more of the narrator in the show. We get her story. We understand that the divorce she’s telling us about is just a way for her to understand her own dissatisfaction with her own life. And the thing of it is, she’s roiling with dissatisfaction. Like a lot of recent Gen X mother narratives, she’s trying out abandoning her family and fascinated with another woman who has abandoned hers. But, like, of course she’s dissatisfied. She gave up her writing career to become a stay at home mom. And when people say to her, “Maybe you should go back to work?” She somehow doesn’t think that’s the answer. It’s a whole crisis about how she doesn’t know who she is anymore but like — she’s changed her name, given up her career and moved to the suburbs. It’s not rocket science.

And weirdly, the TV show is even further removed from the feminist movement than the book was. There’s a reference to “the Future is Female” t-shirts but no one wants to talk about it. The narrator not only works at a men’s magazine (as she did in the book) but also idealizes a super sexist male writer and often re-reads his super sexist books for fun. In the journey from the book to the screen, she’s become one of those women who only like and hang out with men. (More about this later.) There is no sisterhood, only shared trauma. (If this was true for the character in the book, it wasn’t obvious.)

And everyone is just so shockingly unaware of their privilege. But also, they’re aching for meaning and searching for it desperately. The show seems to be trying to say something about “middle age” and “getting older” for our generation and yet I can relate to none of it. The narrator doesn’t recognize herself, doesn’t know who she is anymore and instead of doing stuff to help her find herself, she just shrugs and says, “I guess that’s what getting old means!”

No. Sorry. No. It’s the choices you made, you silly rabbit. You gave up your last name (as does every married woman in this show, another generational disconnect — Millennial women are statistically much more likely to do that. Such a weird backslide. And also weird coming from a writer with a hyphenated name.) You gave up your career. Like — what is this? 1955? Are you struggling with the “problem that has no name”? Read some feminist theory, goddamnit!

I guess that’s the issue. Like, it’s 2022. It should not be a mystery why a woman who has surrendered every aspect of herself (her name, her city, her work, her identity) might not be happy living with shallow people in the suburbs. It’s not some existential conundrum. Like, of course. Of fucking course. Put down the Philip Roth novels and go get yourself some Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or, like, Liz Plank? Maybe some Virginia Woolf if you’re stuck on literary fiction.

It reminds me of this woman I knew in my touring days who confessed to us (the other women on the tour) that she’d never really liked other women. She’d always hung out exclusively with men and allied herself with only men. Eight months into the tour, she got pretty sick of the men’s shit and realized we, the other women on the tour, might be some support, hence the confession. It is a strategic choice to ally with men and not a crazy one in any business run by men (which is most of them). But sooner or later you’re going to run into some sexism that those men will either be unwilling to look at or deal with and you’re going to need some women to help you. This TV show and book seem like a dramatization of that moment and but with no awareness that that is what’s happening. If any of the women in this show had had just one good woman friend, it would have made a world of difference.

This show is hard for me to sympathize with because I have many women friends I can turn to and have turned to all these years. I have been in the feminist movement this whole time. I don’t need to try and figure out who I am now because I haven’t made any choices outside of my own integrity and intention. I haven’t surrendered any of myself and I have trouble relating to these characters who just pushed themselves aside and called it a day. But I guess this is true for a lot of people who follow more conventional paths. Maybe you do find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” In the case of the people in this book, I can guess how you got there.

But then, this reference to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” might just go right over the head of the writer of this book/show because it was a hit in 1980 and a Gen X cultural touchstone. Come to think of it, it’s probably the song the band at that barbeque ought to have been playing instead of “Free Bird.” “Free Bird”?! Did they really use “Free Bird”? Was “Once in a Lifetime” too on the nose? I mean, we’ve known since we were kids that adults might be struggling with their beautiful houses and beautiful wives and the large automobiles or even the shotgun shacks. We’ve heard that it was the “same as it ever was” since 1980. We can even do the dance that goes along with it. “Once in a Lifetime” does a better job of summing up this show than the show does. Maybe that’s why they didn’t use it. Or the rights were just too expensive and so they just went with “Free Bird,” joke or no joke. In this case, it wasn’t funny.