the white girls are in trouble

some thoughts on the fleishman effect, performance, privilege and dishonesty

I really enjoyed the Hulu adaptation of Fleishman is in Trouble, a limited series that starts off shaky but lands in a beautiful, blooming place full of poignant reflections on love, aging, and making peace with the life you’re living rather than obsessing over the life you think you should have lived.

But for me, watching Fleishman is in Trouble was mostly an act of observation, which has been the case for all these recent shows concerned with the lives and “first-world” preoccupations of the rich and white, shows with a satirical bent that chronicle the messy interpersonal catastrophes of people with too much money and no real satisfaction. Shows like The White Lotus and The Gilded Age and Succession (sensing a theme over at HBO). I observe because I am an outsider to the fictional but rooted worlds crafted in these series. I watch these shows out of an almost anthropological curiosity. Is this what it’s like to be rich and white? Yikes, lol. The “yikes” of it all is what, I think, draws many of us in. But it’s not the only reading.