Is a therapist allowed to do that?
By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, May 28, 2009 - 9 Comments
In the drama ‘In Treatment,’ Dr. Paul Weston seems to have a problem with boundaries
Early on in the half-hour HBO drama In Treatment, Dr. Paul Weston, a therapist portrayed with understated aplomb by the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, is seen struggling to unclog the toilet in his home practice. Soon, Laura arrives, an alluring 30-year-old anesthesiologist who insists both that she is in love with him and that he secretly loves her. “I am not a realistic option,” Paul tells her, addressing an infatuation common to psychoanalysis called erotic transference. Suddenly, Laura stands. “I need to pee,” she says. “It’s blocked up,” replies Paul. Laura moves to the door to Paul’s home, domain of his wife and children. Paul grows uncomfortable. “I bet that didn’t come up in med school—a patient in love with the therapist asks to use a bathroom,” says Laura. “What should the therapist do?”
Actually, the question rarely comes up. “This is why I have ambivalence about the show, it seems like there’s a career’s worth of ethical dilemmas in every season,” says Ryan Howes, an L.A. psychologist who groans each time an episode appears in his TiVo cue, so much does it feel like a continuation of his workday. “I find myself doing a lot of backseat driving.” Yet he’s hooked, as are many therapists, who hail the drama as the most accurate depiction of their work yet to hit movie and TV screens. At once cerebral and earthy—how often do TV plots turn on a toilet plunger?—as well as gloriously talky, In Treatment, now in its second season on HBO Canada, is as close to theatre as it is to the 50-minute sessions it so faithfully reproduces. And it’s at least as prone to hyperbole.
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Sometimes Music Is Helpful
By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 3, 2009 at 12:31 PM - 0 Comments
I talked about how much less music In Treatment has than its parent Israeli series, but while that’s still true, other episodes this season will have a little more background music than the premiere episode, and more music than is usual for an HBO series. In an interview with Alan Sepinwall, director Paris Barclay explains that the show has started to embrace the idea of using mood music under dialogue, something that doesn’t usually happen on HBO:
“Because it’s a half hour and it’s just talk, I think a little music helps differentiate the whole afternoon and helps emphasize something,” says Barclay. “There’s going to be more music this year than last year. I think we have probably found music is more helpful than we thought. For a normal person, it’s a hard thing to listen to, just people talking. It helps highlight, puts a little halo on it, invests it with a different emotion than what is being said, in the same way that we’re doing much more with lighting this season, so that every episode is at a different time of day that’s lit for a different time of day.”
Knowing when to use and not use music is a tricky thing, and if many network dramas go too far in one direction, some cable dramas probably could use more music than they have, so it’s interesting to see how In Treatment is still trying to find the right mix (in every sense of the word).
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Shows Without Music
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 2:01 PM - 0 Comments
I just watched the season premiere of In Treatment (based, like the previous season’s episodes, on an episode of the Israeli show it’s based on); the session takes place in a law office, where Paul finds that a former patient will be representing him in a malpractice case. The show still is what it was last year: compelling and claustrophobic. In a way, despite the soap opera format, In Treatment is weirdly reminiscent of a certain type of half-hour sitcom, the Norman Lear type of show that has few characters and few sets, and does many episodes in something resembling real time. Most sitcoms today, even the multi-camera ones, have multiple scenes and sets in every episode, so it takes In Treatment to remind us of the virtues of doing an episode that’s literally like a one-act stage play. Also, the format of the season premiere reminded me a little of some episodes of Frasier in the way Paul uses his therapy skills no matter where he is, and winds up helping people who are supposed to help him. I’m not saying In Treatment is a sitcom, just that it has some of the qualities we used to associate with such things.
It also occurred to me that while I’ve said often that network TV shows have too much background music these days, HBO almost has the exact opposite policy: while they operate on a case-by-case basis, they clearly feel that shows shouldn’t overdo it on the music. They’ve had plenty of shows like The Sopranos and The Wire which use only source music. And one of the big differences between In Treatment and the original series, Betipul, is that the original series has plenty of background music, much like the regular soap operas it’s emulating; it uses mood music to underscore and emphasize emotional scenes.
But on In Treatment, the score is used much more sparingly. The season premiere has only one music sting besides the main title and the ending: there’s a musical score for a silent scene where Byrne walks around the office and gets a sense of what’s in there and what it says about the lawyer. Otherwise it’s all ambient noise, particularly the jackhammers from the street, which are then referred to in an important speech. Even big emotional moments tend to be un-scored. It’s not necessarily better or worse, though I do think that makers of North American “art” TV are a little suspicious of mood music (and correspondingly, a little too anxious to use source music), but just an example of the HBO approach.
By the way, for a sort of backhanded preview of the new season of In Treatment, here is the opening scene of the same episode (that is, the second season premiere of In Treatment) in the original Israeli version. Click “Continue” to see it. Most of this scene, like its counterpart in the American version, is un-scored, but it does use music at the beginning when the main character is walking to the door, which the American version does not.
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