The Philadelphia Inquirer Jonathan Storm Column: Jonathan Storm: HBO Comfortable on a Shrink’s Couch

By Jonathan Storm, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jan. 30–Eagerly chanting “The king is dead,” a lot of folks are ragging on HBO for its latest series, In Treatment, which is a lot like one of its other recent ones, Tell Me You Love Me: psychotherapy on parade with lots of blah, blah, blah, and no action.

They’re wrong. Tell Me You Love Me was a bad misstep, a string of uninteresting couples going nowhere in their various clouds of sexual malaise. Watching them outside the office, in all their dysfunctional couplings or solitary sex acts wasn’t exactly a picnic, either.

But In Treatment presents a tastier smorgasbord of neurotics and misfits, and does it in a novel way: five days a week, one patient a night. It’s perfectly possible to skip Mondays, and the braying beauty who burdens us with a drone of sordid stories, and tune in every week to Tuesday’s macho fighter pilot, Wednesday’s suicidal gymnast or Thursday’s contemporary Bickersons.

And no one would want to miss Fridays, when the long-suffering therapist (played magnificently by Gabriel Byrne) has sessions with his old supervisor (Dianne Wiest), who has her own agenda, in the outstanding acting pas de deux among a weekly showcase of them.

The show, which features half-hour episodes and will run for nine weeks, premiered Monday at 9:30 p.m., with a young anesthesiologist declaring her love for Paul Weston, the therapist. Melissa George, the Australian actress best known as Alias’ Lauren Reed, one of recent TV’s greatest villainesses, is spectacular to look at, and you do get a lot of looking as they sit there and talk. But her character is predictable and unpleasant, and her long story about sex in a nightclub bathroom was enough to turn viewers off completely on the show. You’re lucky you missed it.

Last night, Blair Underwood showed up as Alex, a macho fighter pilot who blasted his Iraqi target just as ordered. Only problem: It turned out to be a school, and 16 children died. Paul and Alex will spar energetically, as the therapist tries to help the patient understand that perfection is not an option among humans.

Tonight introduces the most fascinating of the patients, a nationally ranked gymnast whose mother hates gymnastics and who may have an inappropriate relationship with her coach. She’s feisty, yet suicidal, and you will get to watch another Australian, teenager Mia Wasikowska, who grew up doing ballet, launch what could be a stunning acting career playing Sophie.

Thursdays, it’s couples therapy with Josh Charles, so surprisingly surly after his personable turn as Dan Rydell on Sports Night, and Embeth Davidtz, raised in South Africa and the only foreigner who has trouble with accents. (Byrne, an Irishman, consistently displays a bit of his brogue.) Alternately aggressive and resentful, Jake and Amy struggle with having an abortion, after five years of fertility treatments.

Each weekday at 9, HBO will repeat the patient’s most recent episode, running into a new one. The whole week will be revisited Sundays from 6:30 to 9 p.m., and there are a zillion other ways to catch the show: on demand, on HBO2, or, intriguingly, on HBO Signature, at the times the fictional sessions are supposedly taking place, ranging from Mondays at 9 a.m. to Fridays at 7 p.m.

Though impressed with the scheduling innovations, some critics say HBO has fallen on hard times, desperately fixated on psychotherapy that nobody cares about.

Well, it’s certainly not all-Sopranos-all-the-time (and there was the paradigm for shrink-wrapped drama), but the reason HBO can try these shows is that it is so strong. After all, aren’t the CSIs, Law & Orders and Survivors just variations on less challenging themes?

Not only does In Treatment have a better variety of characters than Tell Me You Love Me, it may work where the sex-a-thon psychiatry failed, because In Treatment is not as realistic. Actual therapy, it seems to this inexperienced observer (so well-grounded, don’t ya know?), is interesting only to its participants.

Adapted from an Israeli hit, In Treatment lets its characters’ lives unspool less clinically and more dramatically, and it’s easy to see how it could become addictive TV drama.

In Treatment frequently seems like a superb stage exercise — one act, two actors (or three on Thursdays), and all those words and emotions.

How do you feel about that?

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Jonathan Storm: Television Review

In Treatment

Weeknights at 9:30 on HBO

To comment on this article, go to: http://go.philly.com/askstorm. Contact television critic Jonathan Storm at 215-854-5618 or jstorm@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/ jonathanstorm.

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