In Treatment
Posted: Sun May 20, 2012 11:37 pm
This is a show best discovered for oneself, so all of this is spoiler-free and thus a little vague. Would be happy to expand on any points in spoilertext, though, for fellow viewers or those inspired to start.
In Treatment sets the bar right out of the gate, and one needs only watch the first episode to discover if this is a show for them: at an early morning therapy session, a sobbing female patient describes the night she's had, recounting an embarrassing sexual encounter before revealing her love for her therapist. This confession and the session's structure itself will form the entire trajectory for the series, four sessions with the therapist receiving recurring patients plus one session with the therapist's therapist spanning the entire week for nine weeks, that is laid here and built upon until the first season ultimately congeals into a novelistic work of density that is as good and ambitious and satisfying as anything that has ever aired on television.
Each of the first season's forty-three episodes is at a basic level a one act play, and it bolsters my long held idea that above all possible dramatic accompaniments, there is simply nothing quite so fascinating as an interesting conversation between two people. But the show screws the knife in deeper and deeper with each passing week as it raises complications and asks serious questions that don't necessarily have easily-gleaned answers. It took me a couple months to work through the first season-- not because of the length (though at forty-three episodes it's certainly a commitment), but because it was just so emotionally exhausting.
There are recognizable names and faces in the first season but rarely have I bought in so completely to the false reality of performance as to those found here. I can't count the times I'd watch and completely forget that these aren't real people. It's not merely the actors who deserve credit-- though they are all exceptional and relatively well-known, making the chameleonic effect all the more impressive-- but the writing which places them within a set artificial construct and works inside the boundaries of their therapy appointments to form whole and complex characters whose minds and mouths go off on tangents in fifty different directions, many of which will never be resolved into pat dramatic arcs. It is this refusal to be boxed-in, to have "likable" characters, that proves the series primary strength: It has the conviction of showing in a heightened form of shorthand the complexity of being human that most series only hint at.
The first and second season are in many ways compliments of each other, but one of the primary disappointments I had with the second season is that despite the presence of more great actors, their parts felt like just that-- parts, roles, characters created to fit a mold. For instance, Alison Pill was very good and convincing in season two as a college student who doesn't want to reveal her cancer diagnosis to her family. But note how I am able to sum her up as thus, whereas Mia Wasikowska's first season counterpoint of sorts Sophie cannot be summed up in terms of mere plot function. Sophie is quite simply the most convincing… portrayal? Embodiment? Representation? of damaged adolescence I've ever seen, and the only adequate summation seems to be that I feel like I know her-- not someone like her, her. The first season has a necessarily thumbnailed understanding of reality whereas the second season has merely well-acted scripts. But I should note that despite my criticisms, the second season (and it's an additional thirty-five episode commitment to mostly new characters) is still highly recommended, as In Treatment is only a disappointment in comparison to itself. (There is a third and final season of twenty-eight more episodes that I have not yet begun. Soon. Please don't spoil anything for me about it)
In Treatment sets the bar right out of the gate, and one needs only watch the first episode to discover if this is a show for them: at an early morning therapy session, a sobbing female patient describes the night she's had, recounting an embarrassing sexual encounter before revealing her love for her therapist. This confession and the session's structure itself will form the entire trajectory for the series, four sessions with the therapist receiving recurring patients plus one session with the therapist's therapist spanning the entire week for nine weeks, that is laid here and built upon until the first season ultimately congeals into a novelistic work of density that is as good and ambitious and satisfying as anything that has ever aired on television.
Each of the first season's forty-three episodes is at a basic level a one act play, and it bolsters my long held idea that above all possible dramatic accompaniments, there is simply nothing quite so fascinating as an interesting conversation between two people. But the show screws the knife in deeper and deeper with each passing week as it raises complications and asks serious questions that don't necessarily have easily-gleaned answers. It took me a couple months to work through the first season-- not because of the length (though at forty-three episodes it's certainly a commitment), but because it was just so emotionally exhausting.
There are recognizable names and faces in the first season but rarely have I bought in so completely to the false reality of performance as to those found here. I can't count the times I'd watch and completely forget that these aren't real people. It's not merely the actors who deserve credit-- though they are all exceptional and relatively well-known, making the chameleonic effect all the more impressive-- but the writing which places them within a set artificial construct and works inside the boundaries of their therapy appointments to form whole and complex characters whose minds and mouths go off on tangents in fifty different directions, many of which will never be resolved into pat dramatic arcs. It is this refusal to be boxed-in, to have "likable" characters, that proves the series primary strength: It has the conviction of showing in a heightened form of shorthand the complexity of being human that most series only hint at.
The first and second season are in many ways compliments of each other, but one of the primary disappointments I had with the second season is that despite the presence of more great actors, their parts felt like just that-- parts, roles, characters created to fit a mold. For instance, Alison Pill was very good and convincing in season two as a college student who doesn't want to reveal her cancer diagnosis to her family. But note how I am able to sum her up as thus, whereas Mia Wasikowska's first season counterpoint of sorts Sophie cannot be summed up in terms of mere plot function. Sophie is quite simply the most convincing… portrayal? Embodiment? Representation? of damaged adolescence I've ever seen, and the only adequate summation seems to be that I feel like I know her-- not someone like her, her. The first season has a necessarily thumbnailed understanding of reality whereas the second season has merely well-acted scripts. But I should note that despite my criticisms, the second season (and it's an additional thirty-five episode commitment to mostly new characters) is still highly recommended, as In Treatment is only a disappointment in comparison to itself. (There is a third and final season of twenty-eight more episodes that I have not yet begun. Soon. Please don't spoil anything for me about it)