Whose Midlife Crisis Is It, Anyway?

The television series begins upside down, with the camera soaring over an inverted Manhattan skyline—squat brick buildings in the top half of the frame, hazy blue sky below. It’s an appropriately destabilizing introduction for a show that’s constantly pulling the rug out from underneath us. The series is untrustworthy, in the best kind of way: It withholds and obscures and implies until it doesn’t. The initial focus is Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg), a newly divorced hepatologist on the Upper East Side whose recently downloaded dating app churns out more lifeless nudes per, even if it’s her much more lucrative career as a talent agent that’s shaped the family until now.