I am – Hercules!!
First a paragraph without spoilers. Know that HBO only ordered four half-hour episodes (instead of five) per week for the third season of its psychotherapy drama “In Treatment.” Two episodes (dealing with patients named Sunil and Frances) air Mondays; two episodes (dealing with a patient named Jesse and Paul’s own therapy) air Tuesdays.
While the sessions with Sunil may be the most entertaining, the ones that analyze 57-year-old psychotherapist Paul himself are the most compelling.
Paul’s longtime mentor and psychotherapist, Gina Toll (Diane Wiest), has moved on to a new career and is no longer available to analyze Paul.
57-year-old Paul is now divorced from Michelle Forbes’ character and sleeping with a 37-year-old named Wendy (played the busy Susan Misner, who in the last five years has scored recurring roles also on “Jonny Zero,” “Starved,” “Night Stalker,” “Conviction,” “Vanished,” “Rescue Me,” “The Bronx is Burning,” “Gossip Girl” and “New Amsterdam”).
Paul has a scary new personal problem that has nothing to do with Wendy.
He goes to see a psychiatrist to get an Ambien prescription renewed and ends up seeing her on a weekly basis.
Paul’s new analyst is Adele, played by the Amy Ryan, a series standout who delivers here a brilliantly dialed-down performance.
Ryan may be on some kind of one-woman crusade against typecasting; her character here is so different from HR exec Holly Flax from “The Office” or mousey cop Beadie Russell from “The Wire” or meth-head Helene McCready from “Gone Baby Gone.” And none of those roles were anything like the others.
If you have to limit yourself to one half hour of “In Treatment” per week (which is not my advice), I say tune in to the Tuesday sessions with Adele and Paul.
Tonight’s first patient, Sunil, is a Bengali math teacher played by Irrfan Khan (“Slumdog Millionaire”).
Sunil, widowed six months earlier, was very recently brought to New York from India by his Osteopath son Arun (“Damages” vet Samrat Chakrabarti) and his American literary agent daughter-in-law Julia (Sonya Walger of “FlashForward” and HBO’s “Tell Me You Love Me” fame, but likely still best known as Penny Widmore on “Lost”).
In the Bengali culture, we’re told, it is a great shame to seek psychotherapy, but Sunil seems severely depressed, so he goes anyway.
I note that at one point in the third episode Sunil puts his hand comfortingly on Paul’s shoulder. Wasn’t there just an episode of NBC’s “Outsourced” built around how taboo a hand on the shoulder was in Indian culture? Was that just wrong for a man to do to a woman? Or is it just taboo in Mumbai? I’d be curious to know if “In Treatment” or “Outsourced” got this right or wrong. One of the cool things about the Sunil segments is it seems to give us a window into a distant culture.
Sunil turns out to be easily the most likeable character of the season.
Frances, a narcissistic 51-year-old former movie star, is played by 55-year-old Debra Winger in her first recurring TV role since she played Wonder Woman’s kid sister back in the ‘70s.
Preparing for a Broadway production of “Night of the Iguana,” Frances keeps forgetting her lines. It sounds like early-onset Alzheimer’s to me, but Paul keeps her talking about her disaster of a personal life, which includes a recently ened 16-year marriage to a Columbia professor, an estranged teen daughter and the dying sister who utilized Paul’s services more than a decade earlier.
My least favorite episodes so far this year focus on Jesse (played by 23-year-old Dane DeHaan of the Lifetime TV movies “At Risk” and “The Front”), a promiscuous 16-year-old homosexual who has just learned his birth mother has been trying to contact him.
He skips school, lies, deals Adderall, pries into Paul’s personal life and constantly badmouths the Catholic couple who adopted him.
Most frustratingly, in his third episode he continues to claim he has not called his birth mother back.
He’s a character hard to care about and harder to like, though I did grow invested in his adoptive mother’s plight when she turned up in Jesse’s third episode.
9 p.m. Monday. HBO.
9 p.m. Tuesday. HBO.
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