‘What Is Jesse Eisenberg Doing Here, Saying These Things I Wrote?’

Novelists aren’t often given the chance to adapt their own work, let alone creatively control each element of the process. Whether this is an envious or excruciating position to be in—or both—is a question Taffy Brodesser-Akner can now answer. A well-known profiler of celebrities (quite memorably of Gwyneth Paltrow and Bradley Cooper) and the author of the best-selling 2019 novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, she has just finished work as the writer, showrunner, and executive producer of the limited-series adaptation of Fleishman, which premieres this week on FX/Hulu.

Brodesser-Akner is a longtime friend, and I wanted to know what it was like to go from inventing the world of Toby Fleishman, a sad-sack doctor on the Upper East Side navigating a divorce, to actually being on set and lying on Toby’s bed. What was it like to see Jesse Eisenberg bring Toby to life, stethoscope around his neck and phone dinging with dating-app notifications? Or to watch Claire Danes, who has the difficult role of Toby’s wife, Rachel Fleishman, rely on her facial expressions to grab