Therapy Week: HBO's "In Treatment" (2008-2009)

2 years ago

Therapy Week: HBO’s “In Treatment” (2008-2009)

Gina, you sleepy spider.

by Tess Lynch

The HBO series In Treatment, the second season of which ended last spring*, is the most successful — by which I mean it’s realistic to a fault and meticulously controlled, and that it occurs in real-time (or nearly so) and always in the same room (or nearly always) — portrayal of therapy I’ve come across. To say this is to acknowledge that In Treatment often tests my patience by boring me; I used to dread certain days of the week, certain sessions, because I found the patients/actors/characters to be dull, narcissistic human beings who were trying to manipulate dear little Dr. Paul Weston and me, the viewer. Paul’s sessions with Gina are usually the toughest for me to get through without reaching for something to read on the internet, glancing up occasionally to scan around and see if Paul is smashed against a bookcase, emoting, or if Gina is poking a fire in her beautiful house’s phenomenal fireplace (I care about Gina’s house). That’s the extent of “watching” I do for Paul and Gina. And yet, I recorded them every week for both seasons, forcing myself to catch up, because I cared so much about other weeks (from season 1: Laura, Sophie, sometimes Amy and Jake; from season 2: April) that it was important for me to feel like I had every scrap of information I might need to enjoy them to the full extent of the TV law. I’ve always nursed some secret fantasy of being a therapist, but I’m probably too much of a gossip, and it would be difficult for me not to offer a lot of unsolicited advice and anecdotal information to my patients to the extent that they would undoubtedly find obnoxious and not at all professional; In Treatment sure nurtures that fantasy, by rewarding the viewer’s patience with moments of really wonderful insight and the kind of understated-but-effective drama that comes from following a character so closely that you do find yourself, months later, wondering after them. I think about Phlox Lombardi from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh sometimes (when I see a woman who is shaped like a guitar), and I also think of Sophie, the teenage gymnast from last season’s In Treatment. Not with quite the same frequency with which I think of Tony Soprano or Paulie Walnuts, or even Livia, but I also didn’t expect to ever think of Sophie again, at least until the very end of the season. There’s so little action, so little dynamism or pyrotechnics, that you enjoy this show slowly, and sometimes, you don’t enjoy it at all.

Melissa George didn’t win me over until the end, even with that smize

Earlier this year I was at a party, talking to a friend. We were set off a bit from the rest of the crowd, probably fixing gimlets or something tacky with ice that had been chilling beer in a cooler. There were a lot of kind of boring guys in sweaters and girls who were being really bossy about playing beer pong and I think the riff raff had started to seep in. “Look at all of those people,” my friend said, “all of their problems are just as important as your problems and they feel things just as deeply as you do.”

“Not that guy though!” I said, because there was a particularly weird guy there who showed up from next door even though he didn’t know anybody, and who had brought three of his own folding chairs and a tiny dog on a leash. He was aggressively trying to make conversation with anyone about anything at all, and he was wearing a paper party hat.

“Yes, he does,” insisted my friend. “His thoughts and preferences are just as important as yours, his life is just as full.”

I battled with him for a bit about the one guy, but the sentiment made an impression on me. This is also why In Treatment is wonderful: each character gets a whole episode, with very few deviations (Paul has some moments allotted now and then for his back-stories: divorce, some drama, blah blah blah. I wish he’d save all of this for his snore-sessions with Gina). Every half hour’s problems are equally important. You will have preferences and opinions regarding the session’s importance and significance within the context of the whole show, sure, but part of watching In Treatment is about the experience of sorting out the importance of each session within Paul’s life, his own relationships to certain patients. Many of the most obnoxious patients — so off-putting in their first and second sessions — have the best pay-offs, the moments you wait for all season. A couple, Jake and Amy, each pretty flawed and grating in their own way, have a pretty killer argument (read: great to watch) during their couples’ session in which Jake records Amy on his cell phone and then plays it back a couple of minutes later to prove a point. In the context of such a talky show, which generally maintains an air of such detachment, it is the zingiest move in the world. I wasn’t sure if it was brilliant or a violation of some code of humanity. I tried it out once, but the payoff isn’t as good in real life. Trust.

Isn’t this image ridiculous? Also, doesn’t Jake look like some guy you know? He looks like five guys I know.

The show is heavily based on the Israeli series BeTipul, the promo for which looks really good (here it is on Youtube) — I kind of like it without subtitles. It’s very relaxing. Like a Quaalude.

When you Google Image Search “Quaalude” this comes up right away! Page #1!

Part of what is fascinating about the premise of BeTipul/In Treatment is that you only see the characters form one relationship: their relationship to Paul. I guess you could also argue that they’re forming new relationships with themselves, too. This is a rare view, narrower than most vistas you get of HBO heroes: on Big Love, we see the Barb who interacts with her mother and her sister, the Barb who steers Bill’s decisions and manages the household, the fragile Barb who struggles with secrets, the Barb who charms the neighbors. Our point of view shifts between the these versions of each character, their chameleon-responses to different situations and all manner of unpredictable circumstances. And then we leave them for another character related to the first, and then another…

During In Treatment, we cage the characters in a room with a mirror, and let them go about unwrapping themselves for us. It’s not always interesting (Diane Wiest, who plays Gina (Paul’s therapist), and who I think is so beautiful and great in everything, didn’t get half as much to do as I would have liked; though season one’s Alex plot-line built to an impressive crescendo, there was a lot of stodgy posturing stuffed into his first few episodes), but that is precisely what forms this absolutely normal, often bleak landscape. Everything becomes so familiar, it actually seems to be genuine. It’s almost a comfort: the routine, the same room every time, and Dr. Paul Weston’s chin resting on the back of his hand with the same old books in the background.

Gina’s water pitcher and glass set make me so thirsty — why? Does that mean it’s effective design? Or is it ineffective, since it’s PURPOSE to make me un-thirsty? I should get a therapist and ask them what that means.

I don’t know if this is just me BS-ing around or if there’s any validity to what I’m about to say, but it’s hard not to consider the fact that Israel was having a pretty intense time when BeTipul premiered in 2005, and by the time the American adaptation had aired in January 2008, we were, nationally, freaking the fuck out. If the show had appeared back in the good old days (and no, I guess they weren’t THAT GOOD, but when you compare the 90’s to 2008? Can we agree? You know, back when I actually would pause to wonder, oh, will Miranda and Steve get back together?), it would not have affected me as much as it did. We could take solace in this self-absorption, because it meant that things couldn’t be so bad, if there was still something else to talk about. There’s something noble about people struggling with these mundane problems, these issues that are objectively so trivial — and this in contrast to the never-ending pounding noise of terrible news; a reality that was becoming more and more impossible to avoid (war, economics, despair; the things behind the things that drive us into the therapist’s office, the reasons that are, for everyone existing in a certain time and place, the same) — and maybe what it is is an assurance that, no matter what, we will go down clinging to our own problems, that the light at the end of the tunnel is that these things mattered, just because we uttered them out loud to someone once.

Tess Lynch would be a better person if Dr. Jennifer Melfi were real.

*I searched around and didn’t see anything definitive, one way or the other, about a third season. If there is a third season, I’d like to see more drug addiction or eating disorders; some way to combine elements of Obsessed or Intervention would not NOT please me very much.

**EDIT: I flipped the character names Sophie and April; thanks to iamyuneek for pointing this out in the comments. I’ve gone back to change this. I’m never writing anything after 2:30 AM again, except emails to customer service departments of various corporate entities with which I am very dissatisfied.