In Treatment
For those of you who read Nancy Franklin's pan in last week's New Yorker of the new HBO show "In Treatment," let me say this: I honestly don't know what she's talking about. It's not just that I disagree with her opinion that:
"(the show)...while offering viewers a seemingly intimate look at (the therapy) process, doesn’t capture the emotional mise en scène: the characters on the show have all too easy a time expressing themselves, and the element of suspense is mostly absent. (What’s missing from “In Treatment” might not have been as noticeable if the show weren’t premièring so soon after “Tell Me You Love Me,” an HBO series about a couples therapist that aired last fall, whose atmosphere of awkwardness and shame came through the TV screen and right up into your face.)"
It's that I find her specific qualms throughout the piece to be completely untrue, if not nonsensical.
But okay, to each her own. For instance, Molly and I could barely watch about five minutes of "Tell Me You Love Me," the show she compares favorably to "In Treatment," before rolling our eyes at the grim, self-involved tone of those characters. And we're finding "In Treatment" particularly fascinating.
Being familiar with the actor Gabriel Byrne primarily as an associate of Keyser Soze (The Usual Suspects), it's quite amazing to watch him here play Paul, a humanistic therapist treating different patients. Deeply intuitive, he coaxes and cajoles them into acknowledging the crux of their issues, after fielding lots of intentional red herrings and denial-ridden false starts. Like in a real therapy session, the recounting of important events in their lives meanders and bounces from one thing to another, each anecdote revealing another piece of a psychic puzzle. Frequently, their narratives intersect with or have relevance to Paul's own life (like any good therapist, he himself is a mess). The show's narrative fulcrum is a female patient experiencing erotic transference with Paul -- this resonates with several story strands.
In its own way, "In Treatment" is as suspenseful as any murder mystery. Put it in your Netflix queue now. Or watch the entire show online.
Linkateria:
- HBO: In Treatment
- In Treatment review (Mary McNamara, LA Times)
- In Treatment (Virginia Heffernan, NY Times)