In Treatment’s fourth season, premiering this Sunday, is an odd construction. Set within pandemic-ridden Los Angeles—a gorgeous, mid-century modern Baldwin Hills apartment, specifically—we attend a series of shaky therapy sessions given by Orange Is the New Black alum Uzo Aduba, as psychologist Dr. Brooke Taylor. Dr. Taylor is beautiful, wealthy, and well-dressed. But from the start, she has trouble establishing boundaries with her patients, and continually finds herself sharing information about her personal life. She is, after all, administering therapy from her own home—whether via Zoom or face-to-face, perched in a Herman Miller chair.
The first three seasons of In Treatment—adapted from an Israeli television show called Be’Tipul— star Irish actor Gabriel Byrne as psychologist Paul Weston. Those seasons follow the same format as the current one, with each patient’s (or couple’s) session taking up a single episode, and a group of four to five patients having multiple sessions (one per week) in a season. Now, a Black woman takes the helm—depending on how you look at it, a move towards inclusive representation or the expansion of a newer stereotype.
The aesthetically pleasing Black therapist is a television trend that was well-catalogued by the New York Times’ Aisha Harris for Slate in 2018. It’s a character who makes sense given how American culture thinks, generally, of Black women. The Black woman therapist is not only nurturing, but emotionally astute, and won’t fall for your avoidance or manipulation. In Treatment tries to complicate the trope by making Dr. Taylor vulnerable herself—a 42-year-old woman with her own difficult pattern of past behaviors to deal with (revealed in episode four) and who has just lost her father, she wrestles with a haunted childhood and persistent sense of loneliness. Her moods tumble into her sessions with a carelessness that’s theoretically good for TV, but seems unrealistic for a therapist of her implied caliber. On her days off, we get to see her with her good-time beau, Adam (Joel Kinnaman), whom her friend Rita, (Liza Colón-Zayas), is wary of. The show’s outside-of-session scenes offer us heavy-handed explanations for her more unconventional methodologies and momentary slip-ups.
Episode one is the hardest to watch. Dr. Taylor’s patient Eladio, a live-in health aide played by Anthony Ramos, comes out of the gate speaking pretentious dialogue that drips with the spoken-aloud names of famous diasporic Latinx writers. As written by playwright Chris Gabo—In Treatment’s fourth season, like previous seasons, is penned mostly by theater vets, including Joshua Allen and Fairview’s Jackie Sibbles Drury—the episode drags like bad theater. Eladio isn’t convincing as a working-class intellectual, but not because of his job or identity. Instead, the lack of authenticity comes from the prestige-writing-workshop overtones of his diction and use of metaphor. For reasons we learn a few episodes later, Dr. Taylor is in rapture, taken by Eladio’s MFA monologues; still, her enthusiasm can’t overcome the staleness of their sessions’ video chat staging.
Dr. Taylor’s other patients fare somewhat better. Chris (John Benjamin Hickey), a mouthy white tech guy parolee from Santa Cruz who committed fraud and has trouble accepting responsibility for his choices, at least brings chaotic energy to the room, giving Aduba something to do. In his sessions, she’s actually forced to perform therapy and listen more attentively; it’s a difficult acting challenge, to make hearing someone seem dynamic and suspenseful. The wonky theatricality of the show makes Aduba’s task even harder. That she pulls through harkens back to the Black woman therapist trope—she carries the weight. Another patient, Laila (Quintessa Swindell)—a young Black woman soon to enter college—is essentially dragged in by her bougie grandmother, who has misgivings about her granddaughter’s lesbian “lifestyle” and what it might mean for her future odds against “failure.” This is Drury’s episode, and her writing mostly manages to circumvent the stuffiness of therapeutic theater by delighting in the irreverence, naivete, and insight of an 18-year-old self-described sex addict.
Watching In Treatment, it’s impossible to ignore how central therapy has become to our culture—not merely as a healing modality, but as a way of relating to each other. Armchair therapists lurk all over Instagram and Twitter, haphazardly mining the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of loved ones and strangers. The show’s fourth season doesn’t offer us a salve for this phenomenon; it, too, is more interested in the performance of therapy than the science of it.
There’s another recent show that does provide ideas about what therapy can (and cannot) do in the right hands: Showtime’s Couples Therapy, which just completed its second season. The show, which controversially films the real-life sessions of couples in New York, has also had to contend with pandemic constraints and Zoom sessions. It may come as no surprise to people familiar with reality TV that the docuseries’ producers managed to weather this curveball more skillfully than In Treatment’s.
Psychoanalytic therapist Dr. Orna Guralnik spends much of her time looking intently at her patients, trying to figure out what they're saying, and where their words and ideas may be coming from. She asks a lot of questions, encouraging the couples that come to see her to develop their individual thoughts further, and occasionally offers her own ideas about what’s going on. Mostly, she’s trying to draw out her patients so that she can make sense of their unconscious thought patterns, a practice that falls within the psychoanalytic tradition. It’s a much more compelling show to watch than In Treatment, not simply because the sessions are real, but because the therapeutic practice is deep. And while we get to see clips of Guralnik’s family and her home in the city, her own work-related sessions with another psychoanalytic therapist, and even a voice-over sequence where Guralnik talks briefly about her dynamic with her parents, we really only get to know the therapist as a practitioner.
By refusing to obey the boundary intrinsic to therapeutic practice—namely, that a therapist does not (consciously) involve their own personal life in the session or otherwise take up space beyond their capacity as therapist—In Treatment becomes a soap opera about a struggling psychologist. The three patients become window dressing, supporting characters in Dr.Taylor’s star vehicle. It’s not a difficult premise to accept, since Aduba is so fun to watch—an incredibly skilled actor who is clearly invested in every moment. But the whole affair doesn’t do much for elucidating or challenging the practice of therapy itself. You get the sense that Aduba could have any caretaking role—doctor, addiction counselor, parent, caseworker, teacher—and the show could play out in the same way, if not a bit more freely.
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May 20, 2021 at 03:09AM
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/05/season-four-of-in-treatment-gives-little-insight
Season Four of In Treatment Gives Little Insight - Vanity Fair
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