In Treatment (American TV series)
In Treatment is an American HBO drama, produced and developed by Rodrigo Garcia, about a psychotherapist, 50-something Paul Weston, and his weekly sessions with patients, as well as those with his own therapist at the end of the week. The program, which stars Gabriel Byrne as Paul, debuted on January 28, 2008, as a five-night-a-week series. The series' executive producer and principal director was Paris Barclay, who directed 35 episodes, the most of any director on the series, and the only director who directed episodes in all three seasons. The program's format, script and opening theme are based on, and are often verbatim translations of the Israeli series BeTipul, created by Hagai Levi, Ori Sivan and Nir Bergman.
After winning critical acclaim and numerous honors, including Emmy, Golden Globe and Writers Guild awards, In Treatment returned for a second season, premiering on April 5, 2009. The second season built on the success of the first, winning a 2009 Peabody Award. The third and final season premiered on October 26, 2010, for a seven-week run, with four episodes per week.
The series was renewed for a second season on June 20, 2008, with Byrne, Wiest and Glynn Turman returning. Michelle Forbes, who played Paul's wife in the first season, made two brief appearances in the second season. Production on Season 2 began in New York City in the fall and wrapped up in early 2009. According to The New York Times, production relocated to New York from Los Angeles at the insistence of Byrne, who otherwise threatened to resign. The move and the addition of Sunday night to the schedule were considered votes of confidence in the series by HBO executives.
HBO Canada, a multiplex channel that includes The Movie Network in Eastern Canada and Movie Central in Western Canada, aired the program simultaneously with HBO in the U.S. During the first few weeks of Season 1, episodes were available on HBO's website in streaming video. The free service was discontinued, however, when Apple's iTunes and Amazon Unbox began offering the first 15 shows for download.
In July 2020, it was reported that HBO was developing a reboot of the series.
Plot
Set in Baltimore, psychotherapist Dr. Paul Weston has a private practice where he carries out sessions with his patients in his own home. He begins to question his own abilities and motives, so he seeks help from his former mentor and therapist Dr. Gina Toll, whom he has not seen for ten years.Characters
Paul Weston
portrays Paul Weston, a charming, relentless psychologist, who is seeking his own peaceful existence, free of self-doubt and ambivalence. Paul is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he earned his undergraduate degree, Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree and The New School, where he received his PhD. In summer 1988, he moved to Maryland, where he worked at the Washington–Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute and later established his private practice in Baltimore.Gina Toll
portrays psychotherapist Gina Toll, Paul Weston's former mentor and clinical supervisor whom Paul avoided for nine years after an argument over reservations expressed by Gina in a letter of recommendation on Paul's behalf. She acts as a sounding board for Paul's doubts about his own motives and abilities.Season summaries
Each episode of In Treatment focuses on one patient, including Paul, who is seeing his clinical supervisor and psychotherapist, Gina.Season 1
Therapy patient Laura, professes her love for Paul, which causes their relationship to grow more complex and difficult to control. Laura's personal issues include being seduced by a much older man when she was a teenager. She begins an unsatisfying sexual relationship with Alex, another of Paul’s patients. Paul reflects on his own feelings for her and believes that he is in love with her, however sessions with Gina fail to resolve his inner conflict over his desire and professional responsibility. Midway through the season, Laura ends her therapy with Paul after he continues to reject her advances. Paul and Laura encounter each other at Alex's funeral, and later Paul decides pursue Laura at the risk of destroying his marriage, but a panic attack prevents him from going through with it.Alex, a fighter pilot who finds it impossible to express his internal struggles, meets Laura and has a brief affair with her. Paul tries to get Alex to break through to his reasons for running himself to exhaustion and examine his feelings about killing Iraqi schoolchildren during a sanctioned mission. Alex drifts into instability, eventually deciding to end his therapy, and returns to the military just as Paul begins to make progress with Alex's repressed insecurities. Alex is killed during a training exercise, and although his death is ruled an accident, some indications suggest that Alex's death may have been a suicidal reaction caused by the trauma of therapeutic reflection.
Sophie's ambivalence to life is elicited and broken down by Paul, who is able to successfully examine her underage sexual relationship with her much-older gymnastics coach Cy and its effects on her, in addition to her conflicted feelings about her divorced parents and her father's distance from her. Eventually, Sophie benefits greatly from her therapy with Paul and begins to repair her relationship with her parents. At the end of the season, Sophie leaves Baltimore to pursue further gymnastic training in Denver.
Jake and Amy's debate regarding whether or not she should have an abortion is just the prologue to an extremely volatile, dysfunctional relationship. During their second therapy session, Amy experiences a miscarriage, but the couple returns to therapy to work on their issues. Amy's inability to hold emotional connection leads her to have an affair with her boss, a man she finds "gross" but uses as a buffer against her husband. Jake and Amy each have an individual sessions, and finally and sadly decide to end their tumultuous marriage and share custody of their son. Jake believes that the therapy was helpful, but Amy thinks it hurt their marriage.
Throughout the season, Gina and Paul confront each other over issues regarding their shared history and opposing views, but by the finale Paul realizes he needs her input and agrees to continue therapy.
The first season consists of 43 episodes, with each episode airing on their allotted day of the week, Monday to Friday. The episodes were spread over nine weeks for most of the characters, except in the final week, which did not have Monday or Tuesday night installments.
Season 2
Paul, now divorced and quite lonely, has relocated to Brooklyn, and uses the living room of his small refurbished walk-up brownstone for patient visits. He has brought his books and his patient files with him to his new apartment. In Session 1 he states that he attended Columbia University, but this is in complete contradiction to the two University of Pennsylvania diplomas that hung in his Maryland office next to the patient exit door. He never mentions anything about Penn. He is served with a malpractice lawsuit from Alex's father in the first episode, and becomes preoccupied with the consequences.Alex Sr. sues Paul for negligence, charging him with failing to prevent the death of his son Alex Jr., a former patient who voluntarily discontinued therapy and was killed in a plane crash that was either an accident or suicide. Alex, Sr. and his lawyers contend that Paul's professional responsibility was to contact the military and report Alex, Jr. unfit for duty.. Alex Sr. later meets with Paul and makes a loaded offer: if Paul writes a letter taking blame for Alex Jr.'s death, he will drop the lawsuit against him, satisfied to have his belief that Paul is 100% at fault confirmed.
Paul's personal neurotic and self-aggrandizing behavior was a significant theme throughout the series. He identified with all of his patients' issues and interpersonal conflicts on some level. Ironically, he was their composite personality, except he was intended to be the resolution expert. His self-doubt and feelings of personal inadequacy revealed over the seven weeks made him appear even more vulnerable than those he was treating. As the final episode drew to a close, Paul pulled the plug on his own desire for treatment, with the same ambivalence his patients had exhibited. Was it really making a difference? Alex's father has a meeting where he makes this offer: he will drop his lawsuit if Paul will write him a letter taking 100% of the blame for Alex's death. Paul considers this offer but later concurs with Gina's advice and tells Alex Sr. his offer is rejected. The lawsuit was dismissed as frivolous, and his angst involving his professional competency was alleviated, at least temporarily.
The final symbolic message Paul delivered to his audience by that decision was, there are times in one's life when therapy is valuable for a person to become more grounded in reality. However, more often than not, therapy alone only serves as a road map to find a patient's way in the world. Paul realizes he "needs to stop analyzing his life and needs to start living it". Given enough time and patience, and by accepting that there are past events that cannot be controlled or changed, everything in life tends to work out by itself and not by recreation or reparation of former deeds.
The season had seven episodes for each character. The "Monday" and "Tuesday" sessions aired back-to-back on Sundays, while the remaining three ran on Mondays. HBO repeated the episodes in sequence, several times each week. The season's executive producer was Warren Leight, who previously worked on .
| Actor | Character | Weekday | Role |
| Hope Davis | Mia Nesky | Monday | Mia is successful malpractice attorney and former patient of Paul's from 20 years ago. She blames him for her present status: an unmarried, childless workaholic, who makes poor choices in men. |
| Alison Pill | April | Tuesday | April is Pratt Institute architecture student diagnosed with lymphoma which she has been concealing from everyone but Paul. She is in denial about the severity of her illness. |
| Aaron Shaw Sherri Saum Russell Hornsby | Oliver Bess Luke | Wednesday | Oliver is the 12-year-old son of Bess and Luke, a divorcing couple who claim to love their son but are intent in pursuing their own goals. Oliver is caught in the middle and blames himself for his family's chaos. |
| John Mahoney | Walter Barnett | Thursday | Walter is self-confident CEO with a history of panic attacks, who finds his life is becoming overwhelming. |
| Dianne Wiest | Gina Toll | Friday | Gina is Paul's own therapist and mentor who diligently tries to guide Paul away from a mid-life crisis and down the road to personal satisfaction and validation. |
| Glynn Turman | Alex Prince Sr. | Various | Alex Sr. sues Paul for negligence, over failing to prevent the death of his son Alex Jr., a former patient, seen in season one, who died after discontinuing sessions with Paul. |
| Laila Robins | Tammy Kent | Various | Tammy is Paul's first girlfriend and, coincidentally, a patient of Gina's. |
Season 3
The third season is the first series not based on the original Israeli series "Be Tipul", which ran for only two seasons. The format is similar, each week, a series of patients visit psychotherapist Paul Weston in half-hour episodes, while in the last, Paul visits his own therapist who is Adele Brouse rather than Gina Toll who appeared in the first two seasons.Also, there are only three patients this time around, and their stories offer a similar depth to the previous seasons. Paul still lives in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn though he does now have a young girlfriend, Wendy.
On Mondays, he meets with Sunil, a widower transported to New York from Calcutta following the death of his wife, to live with his son, his son’s wife and their two young children.
Tuesday’s patient is Frances, a self-described successful actress who has returned to the stage, but has difficulty remembering her lines. She’s also coping with a dying sister, a broken marriage and a scornful teenage daughter.
On Wednesdays Paul sees Jesse, a high school student who believes his adopted parents hate him because he is gay though he is also bitter, abusive and manipulative.
Paul eventually re-enters therapy with the young psychoanalyst Adele Brouse, initially seeking a prescription for sleep medication, but she accurately perceives that lack of sleep is not his real problem.
The show remained set in Paul's apartment in Brooklyn, New York, the same location of his office in season 2. Unlike its first two seasons, the third season contained only four episodes per week. The show aired on Mondays and Tuesdays and, like season 2, had seven weeks of sessions.
Following the final episode of the second season, Leight said in an interview that a third season remained a possibility, but pointed out that the show had been exhausting for everyone involved and also somewhat less than a "breakout hit" for HBO. However, on October 23, 2009, HBO announced that it had picked up In Treatment for a third season. Production began in early 2010 for a premiere in late October.
On March 30, 2011, HBO said In Treatment would not continue in its existing form but the network was talking with the show's producers about possibly continuing in a different format. The final result was the ending of the series, with the third season being the last.
Critical response
The series was generally well-received, attaining positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Metacritic, the first season scored 70/100, the second season scored 85/100, and the third season scored 83/100.The Los Angeles Times Mary McNamara called it "cleverly conceived," well-written and -acted, though "stagey" and "strain... believability". Variety