There is no action to speak of in the HBO series “In Treatment.” It’s not just different for television, a medium that is anything but static: It may even be historic.
Occasionally a character rises from the couch, gazes out the window, moves an ashtray or fiddles with a phone. There’s plenty of internal commotion, but fans of this fine, thinking-person’s series don’t watch for car chases.
“In Treatment,” with rich, back-to- back sessions airing Monday and Tuesday nights at 7 and 7:30 on HBO, draws a small but loyal audience. Put this one on your Netflix list for an absorbing and artful contemporary dramatic work. Consider it a challenge.
Originally an Israeli production remade for the U.S. audience, the cerebral series does offer a certain voyeuristic appeal.
The acting and writing have to be great — and they are — in order to keep viewers hooked on what is essentially a talking head show, a half- hour two-person dramatic conversation between therapist and several individual patients, plus the therapist’s increasingly profound sessions with his own therapist.
Double dose of insight
The voyeurism comes in two forms: For those who have never been in therapy, the show offers a peek inside the doctor’s office, a taste of the unique sort of exchanges that can be so difficult, maddening and ultimately revealing. For those who have undergone psychotherapy, the voyeuristic appeal is seeing the normally hidden side of the therapist laid out as a complete character. Not only do we observe the chaotic home life and flawed personality of the doctor, here played by Gabriel Byrne. But we get to sit in as the therapist’s own layers are stripped away by his shrink. Amazing how perceptive this psychoanalyst can be about other people, and how clueless about himself.
A therapist in treatment
This season, the peeling of the onion goes even deeper. Paul Weston (Byrne) has grudgingly begun therapy with a new, young therapist named Adele (Amy Ryan) after years of seeing his peer Gina (Dianne Wiest), with whom he had a complicated colleague-patient relationship. He’s worried about his physical health and a disease which he may have inherited from his late father.
The genius of the series is its ability to draw us into the mental and emotional stories of an entire caseload of characters, with rich dialogue, taut deliveries, emotional outpourings and little change in scenery. Each 45-minute session is condensed into a half- hour, give or take a bit of before and after exposition. Occasionally the story turns to Paul’s son; now and then it ventures outside the office. Mostly it’s confined to the therapeutic session.
The interaction between therapist and patient is unlike any other relationship in the outside world, subject to endless interpretation. And interpretation of the interpretation. The baggage of a lifetime in the outside world is condensed into the give and take with the doctor; old relationships and ways of being are recapitulated in the privacy of that room.
Clearly the show, like therapy itself, is not for everyone.
Each twosome is a necessarily fraught relationship, difficult for writer and director to dramatize. Each is an internal struggle to connect, a challenge for the actors.
Debra Winger plays Frances, an aging actress with trouble remembering her lines and, she mentions incidentally, a dying sister. Dane DeHaan plays Jesse, a promiscuous gay teen on the verge of connecting with his birth mother. He likes to shock Paul and test his patience. Irrfan Kahn is simply riveting as Sunil, a widower and Calcutta native, uprooted and moved to Brooklyn by his family.
And Ryan (“Gone Baby Gone,” “The Office”) is pitch-perfect as Adele, who challenges Paul in a way his former therapist, Gina, did not.
Now in its third season, the show (like the therapy process?) is addicting for anyone who is intrigued and regularly amazed by what makes people tick.
Talk about “appointment viewing.”
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
