HBO is premiering In Treatment tonight, but for my money, pop culture best explored psychiatry in Comedy Central’s Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. Early reviews aren’t promising — here’s a slice of Slate’s take:
Adapted from an Israeli drama titled BeTipul, In Treatment (HBO, weeknights at 9:30 p.m. ET) follows Paul Weston, a psychotherapist played by Gabriel Byrne with the kind of conviction that can only come from an actor faced with ambitious hogwash. The show’s controlling gimmick dictates that it will air nightly for the next nine weeks, with Paul keeping regular appointments with the same patients each night of the week, except for Fridays, when he goes to see Dianne Wiest’s Dr. Toll, the Kupferberg to his Melfi. His nonadventures straddle the realms of the scarcely credible and the incredibly boring.
Another recent show exploiting the fragile mental state of fellow man is Celebrity Rehab. Must we, really, ogle people going through withdrawal? Is it really so fascinating to listen to their stories of broken homes, broken lives, and feed into their vainglorious attempts for one more shot at fame, succeeding only in pandering to the lowest common denominator?
February 4, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I would be the last person to besmirch the marevelous Dr. Katz (In was, unbeknonwst to me at the time, his classmate at a small Vermont college). However, as a “professional therapist” myself – and one who is highly critical of the foibles and pretensions of that profession – I can’t agree with the derogatory takes on “In Treatment”. I find it an extremely compelling and well-drawn portrait of a situation I live every day. Yes, it is TV – one of the interesting (and perhaps disturbing) aspects of this is how little the acting interferes with being able to engage this as real. There may be some interesting discussions here to be had about to what extent patients and therapists are, in fact, actors while therapy, as well as ones about how many of the actors involved have been in therapy themselves. One thing is for sure, whoever wrote and directed this show KNOWS therapy from the inside – while I have some technical criticisms about Weston’s technique (he makes some first -year trainee mistakes), they are mistakes which many an exprienced therapist might make in a given situation (unlike the highly inept Dr. Melfi, who could only be seen as plausible as a depiction of ineptitude). Especially well-captured, I think, is a key element of therapy (from the therapist perspective), how interpetations are received by patients. A BIG potential mistake would have been to write this like a connected narrative – I think the way patient narratives shift at seemingly arbotrary points looks very much like the real thing – especially when the subject is changed following a therapist comment. As a clinician, I found myself attending to these shifts much as I would in a real session: was the subject change resistance to an interpretation or evidence that I was totally off the mark. I will be very interested to see what the consensus from the therapy and patient community will be (if any).