By Curt Schleier

There’s something about therapy that HBO seems to find irresistible.  Tony Soprano was seeing a shrink.  TELL ME YOU LOVE ME was about some dysfunctional people who went to a counselor who spouted psychobabble for a living.  And the people behind JOHN FROM CINCINNATI needed to see a doctor.

Now comes IN TREATMENT, based on a hit Israeli series, which has several conceits.  The first is that original episodes run each weeknight.  Therapist Paul Weston (Gabriele Byrne) sees the same patient the same night for the nine-week run of the series.  For example, every Monday he has a session with Laura (Melissa George), every Tuesday it will be Alex and so on.

Except for Fridays when the shrink will be going to his own shrink, because he feels his professional and personal life are falling apart.  Based on the network’s track record this season, I wasn’t expecting much.  But in the early episodes, at least, the patients seem interesting and not entirely cliché-like.  Weston himself seems intelligent and exactly the kind of reassuring, calm-in-the-face-of-a-storm therapist I’d be seeing if I needed help, which of course I don’t because I am extremely emotionally healthy, vibrant even, as anyone who reads my work can tell.


Laura, however, is another story.  She starts her session in tears, because “my life is over.” Why?  “I did some horrible things last night.” 

Laura, an anesthesiologist, had a fight with her live-in boy friend, who, she claims, gave her an ultimatum: get married or we split up.  She didn’t like that, so she ran over to a friend’s house, put on one of her friend’s slinky dresses and they went out drinking.

Her friend is jealous.  She wishes someone would give her that kind of ultimatum.  And after a couple of rounds the friend goes home.  A guy buys her a few more and then follows her into the unisex bathroom.  At first she’s angry.  They she’s horny.  Then she’s guilty and tells the guy “no.”  He gets angry and demands at least some satisfaction.  She provides it and then in the middle of the night runs to the therapist’s office and sits outside his home office until her appointment.

Weston asks her some probing questions, and it soon turns out that it wasn’t her boyfriend who brought up the ultimatum, it was her.  And, she says, it isn’t the first time she’s been unfaithful.  And by unfaithful she means she’s fallen in love with her analyst. “You’ve become the center of my life,” she tells him.


This is disappointing.  It’s not just the patient falls in love with her doctor chestnut, but that I knew where this was going before the good doctor did, from the way she: ran to him that night and freezing waited by his door; asks his opinion about her appearance; and says that she didn’t go through with the bathroom nasty because “I thought about you and us going through this in therapy.”  The fact that the doctor didn’t catch these clues may be why he’s in therapy himself. 

Despite this nit, though, I believe IN TREATMENT is off to a promising start. I try not to judge a series by its first episode so I won’t say more than that.  But after the disaster that was 2007 for HBO, the network is already turning things around.  The series shows promise.  Laura’s story was interesting.  Let’s see what happens with it.