US TV: the hits and misses of a turbulent season

Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...

We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.

But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.

Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.

It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.

Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.

The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.

Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...

Separation anxiety as In Treatment ends

In Treatment hasn't been a big hit for HBO, with an estimated 2 million viewers. But it's one of those TV shows whose 2 million fans are intensely passionate and loyal - they'd have to be to watch some 43 therapy sessions over the course of nine weeks. "I've heard from more readers who are fanatical about In Treatment - loving its phenomenal acting, obsessing over its psychological twists, stressing about its still unclear future- than from viewers of shows that get five times as many eyes," reports Boston Globe's Matthew Gilbert.

Well it's time to terminate with the first season of In Treatment, whether you feel strong enough or not. Tonight at 9:30, the show comes to a close as Gabriel Byrne's Dr. Paul Weston grapples once and for all with his attraction to his patient Laura (Melissa George). It has been particularly excruciating to say goodbye to Paul and his clients during these final weeks, because we've bonded with them so intimately. We've come to know Sophie, Laura, Alex, Paul, Jake, and Amy from the inside out, as if looking through a telescope onto their souls. Most dramas are built on action and foray into character and feeling, but In Treatment has been all emotion and introspection, all the time.

Maybe grieving fans feel the same tug this week that therapists feel as they finish up with their most vivid clients. Like therapists, we're letting go of something to which we've been committed, an exercise in ruthless honesty and liberating self-definition. We've been privy to the secret torments and the lifelong challenges of these characters, seen them rise up to conquer their demons or, in the case of Alex (Blair Underwood), succumb. Nowhere was the beauty of watching a patient open up more profound than in the case of suicidal teenager Sophie, played with amazing honesty (and a flawless accent) by Australian actress Mia Wasikowska. You had to feel for Sophie as she fell apart and put herself back together with Paul's help. At a certain point in her treatment, we realized - as Paul did - that it was foolish to underestimate her. She only needed protecting by a trustworthy adult male to flourish. When Paul barred Sophie's absentee father from crashing her last session, it was one of the show's most heart-rending moments.

Sophie's final words to her mentor: "Farewell old fart." Perfect.

Adapted from an Israeli show by Rodrigo Garcia, In Treatment has been a masterwork of scripting from the start to tonight's finish, which lands in exactly the right spot. The writers never cop out on this show with shortcuts, even while the sessions are condensed down to 30-minutes episodes, and that is especially true tonight when Paul goes to see Laura. Some of the finale is jarring, as we leave the office to go to Laura's home - but that strangeness suits the material, since Paul is entering a therapist's moral free-fall zone. He goes to her only after watching his wife, Kate, sleep, something each husband on the show has done at a critical point in the marriage.

The writers have also expertly made In Treatment into a hall of mirrors. We've seen Paul's clients reveal their selves as they project their fears and wishes onto Paul; and we've seen Paul reveal his own conflicts through his projections onto his therapist, Gina (Dianne Wiest) and his clients. When Paul angrily accuses Gina of trying to stop him from sleeping with Laura, he is, essentially, talking to himself. And we've clearly seen Gina's biases, her impact on the direction that Paul takes. As if inside a turning prism, all the therapists and patients are casting light onto one another to different degrees and at different angles at different times. The actors have taken these fascinating scripts and run with them. The performances have been outrageously good, good enough to get viewers to forget about all the sitting and staring. As our window onto the patients, Byrne has been the most extraordinary.

By the third week of the series, we could almost read his thoughts while he sat poker-faced, listening. And as a flawed man, finding his own life mirrored in his clients, questioning his marriage and his professional abilities, he has been moving and chilling. He has made Paul's troubles into both a pat midlife crisis and yet so much more. It was through Byrne's character that In Treatment questioned the value of talk therapy itself, as Paul lost faith in his power to help others and to be helped by Gina. Byrne's performance is even more monumental when you think about the mechanics of it. The show was filmed in chronological order, with a few days for each episode. So while the supporting actors came and went over the course of months, Byrne was in almost every single scene without end. That's a dense schedule even for TV actors, who generally face rigorous filming schedules.

About Wasikowska, about Wiest, about Michelle Forbes as Kate, not enough enthusiastic things can be said. In the scene last week when Gina tips her hand about her own romantic passions, Wiest managed to make a passive-aggressive and self-righteous woman wholly sympathetic in an instant. Embeth Davidtz and Josh Charles were a compellingly brittle pair as Jake and Amy, whose estrangement spoke to Paul's fears about his own marriage. Even the one-time, peripheral performances were unforgettable, most notably Glynn Turman (from The Wire) as Alex's father, who accuses Paul of shattering his son's much-needed state of denial. Turman was exactly the man we'd been imagining during Alex's sessions, and he even adopted Underwood's mannerisms so that Alex's ghost always seemed nearby.

By the end of tonight's finale, the show has affirmed talk therapy as a healing method. Just as the acting and dialogue of In Treatment have thrived within a tight nightly structure, many of the characters on the show have thrived within the careful boundaries of their sessions. And yet In Treatment also leaves us with a reminder that therapists are human, too. Like Paul, like Gina, they travel in the footsteps of their parents, they muddle through their own failures, and they suffer their own losses.

Further reading: Memorable TV therapists

Shrink rap is the key

If you've watched HBO's In Treatment, you've seen Gabriel Byrne sitting in a chair, playing therapist to Melissa George's seductive patient. "Let's talk about what's really going on here. Mmmmm?" he says as the camera closes in on his warm blue eyes boring into hers. He raises an eyebrow. Silence. He crosses his legs. He taps his fingertips together. The central role, with an abundance of close-ups and tiny nuances, could have been an actor's dream. Or nightmare. For Byrne, perfecting it to his satisfaction was more like toothache -- fine, now that it's been dealt with notes Lynn Smith.

Byrne's Dr. Paul Weston dominates nearly every scene in every episode of the five-night-a-week therapy drama. The action consists mostly of talking and listening, and takes place in one room -- either his home office or his own therapist's home office. The first season of In Treatment draws to a close next week, and rumors abound over the fate of the series, which like the network's The Wire, has a cultish following, but relatively few viewers. Those who like the series love Byrne's portrayal of the troubled Dr. Weston, tempted by a severe case of mutual erotic transference with Laura (George). Judging by the lovelorn postings on Internet sites, they also love the 57-year-old Irish actor. Those who don't tuned out long ago.

In any case, there's little doubt that Byrne, after a career of small independent films and stage acting, has finally found a star vehicle on TV. "It's a delightful kind of surprise that people like it," said Byrne recently during a short visit to Los Angeles. Even the HBO-estimated 450,000 viewers are more than he's used to. He admitted he was thrilled to get a congratulatory call from his favorite actress (whom he refused to name) but was also frightened by a New York woman who approached him on the street and sternly admonished, "Don't you go with that Laura!"

A singular and intensely introspective actor who aims to reveal himself in his roles, Byrne called Dr. Weston and the 12-week shoot on a cramped set particularly challenging. His opinions on how he wanted to play it -- no props, extended silences, totally engaged --eventually prevailed on set, but apparently not without creative debate. None of that matters now, he said. "All that matters in the end is that it got done."

Settled in a sunlit corner of Hollywood's Chateau Marmont lobby, Byrne matched the California version of Old World elegance perfectly. "I'm overdressed," he said in his signature brogue, removing a sweatshirt from over his jacket, and ordering a cup of tea. A self-described gentleman who conducts himself with "a certain amount of reserve," Byrne nevertheless spoke effortlessly for almost three hours on his life and art, quoting actors, philosophers and New Yorker cartoons. He even sang a few bars of favourite songs (Sinatra singing Jobim) and offered some spontaneous impersonations ( Max von Sydow and Bill Clinton).

To Byrne, who lives in Brooklyn, Hollywood is like a small village, one he inhabits at the non-commercial edges. After making a splash with Miller's Crossing (1990), The Usual Suspects (1995) and his 1999 divorce from actress Ellen Barkin, Byrne said he moved to New York to be close to his children. To get roles in mainstream films, he said: "You have to be in a movie that makes a lot of money. That changes everything. And if you're not, you go do independent films." Anyone who leaves L.A. for New York "might as well be dead," he said.

Still, there are compensations. Byrne worked on Broadway (A Moon for the Misbegotten) and with a who's who of indie directors: Wim Wenders, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Bryan Singer, the Coen brothers, Costa-Gavras, John Boorman, Ken Russell and Ken Loach. Even if one of his films was panned, Byrne has almost always received positive reviews in which he was invariably called the "brooding Irish heartthrob." He no longer complains about the brooding part ("There are worse things to be told") and noted wryly that last year he ranked among the last three actors on People magazine's also-ran list for "The Sexiest Man Alive."

But in the lobby's waning light he also appeared tired and sad -- a lot like Dr. Weston, whom critics have labelled "world weary." In the series, Laura tells him that when they first met, "I thought you looked like a dead man. I wanted to breathe life into you." Byrne said he's always been aware of life's ups and downs, but after he was offered the Weston role, he said he had a realization about life: It's all about loss. "The fact of life is, we lose everything," he said. "People we love. People who love us. I've lost people very close to me. And I've lost things I never thought I would lose. I have known failure. And I have known success of a kind. What I wanted to bring to that man was a sense of, at the end of the day we're all united by our common humanity."

As young as 12, Byrne said he had a romantic idea of "escaping from the world" and left his home in Dublin for a London monastery. Eventually, at 29, he replaced the monastery and other dead-end vocations with Dublin theatres. "Acting is also a form of escape from the world," he said, and, like a monastery, it offers the structure that actors like himself crave.

He never took acting lessons, he said, but learned as he went by making mistakes. "It's like if somebody says to you, 'Here's wood, I want you to make a table.' If you were really ignorant, like I was at the time, I had no idea where the legs on the table went. I just went out and started hammering pieces of wood together and people said, 'Actually, the legs are supposed to be on the bottom.' " Now, he said, his creative process is about "allowing the camera into yourself. . . . What's important is that you get at the things that can't really be written," he said. Rather than "acting" feelings, he said he puts himself into their service. A mysterious and seductive fact about cameras, he said, is that they "photograph your thoughts."

For the role of Paul Weston, he said he had to study how to make the act of listening interesting and compelling to viewers. In particular, he watched old tapes of The Dick Cavett Show. "I looked at the way he interviewed people, he said. "He was never overawed, never judgemental. He was sometimes flustered. He was sometimes awkward. I thought this guy doesn't have to be perfect, he doesn't have to have an immediate response. He can actually take a moment." Most important, he said, was that he engage with and respond to each of his patients differently. "If you were a detached figure, it's over, finished, then you're just watching two people talk," he said. "I knew what I wanted it to be. I wanted him to be flawed, very flawed. I wanted him to be really compassionate, not afraid to open up to the camera, not afraid to show vulnerability." He also knew he was a liar and had a temper.

On set, he imagines his ideas annoyed fellow actors. "During rehearsal I said, to I'm sure repressed groans and sniggers of people in the scene, 'What's wrong with thinking about Pinter and Beckett? What's wrong with thinking about how Pinter uses silences? Or how Beckett uses one line to say something that can be conflicted or have another meaning to it? What's wrong with that?' " He said he was asked to use an American accent. "I said no." Unless a character has a stated ethnicity, he uses his own voice in an effort to promote everyday diversity, he said.

Byrne never watches his own performances because he is too self-critical, he said. The only parts he's seen of In Treatment were the clips shown on a recent Charlie Rose appearance. If he doesn't watch, he said his performance "stays in that place where it can't be attacked in my head. Therefore it's like a stage performance. My memory of it is totally protected. As soon as I start to look at it, that shatters. Then I'm full of doubt and say I shouldn't have done that."

At about that moment in the conversation, a leggy blond with a cellphone to her ear approached his sofa. The woman, Katya, wanted to make plans to get together, but Byrne said politely that he had to get back to New York for St. Patrick's Day. She asked for his phone number, complaining that he never answers the one she calls. He promised he would, and sent her off with, "It's great to see you." After a moment, he said, "A friend I haven't seen in quite a while," managing to appear simultaneously nonchalant and sheepish.

When asked about his romantic life, Byrne quoted Laurence Olivier: "One gets along, you know." Pause. "It's nice and uncomplicated at the moment." Like Dr. Weston, he's gone through his own midlife crisis, or "manopause," he said, but now cares about other things -- such as politics. (He recently held a fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton at his home.) And continuing to improve his acting. His latest film, Emotional Arithmetic, with Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer and Von Sydow, will be released later this year.

Looking around at the film world, Byrne thinks he understands why some old-timers like Warren Beatty might have dropped out. "It's a very peculiar business. The world of the cinema has changed," he said. "There's better writing now in television to a great extent." So far, he said no one from HBO had talked to him about a second season. He thought before answering a question about whether he would be willing to take up Dr. Weston again. "It's a fascinating character and I'm open," he said finally. "I would never shut the door on anything."

Opening up about 'Treatment' mother

For the moment, Jaffa oranges and Uzis are no longer Israel's most famous export. That title belongs to a TV shrink and his roster of troubled patients says Matti Friedman...

Before In Treatment became a daily drama staple on HBO, it was Betipul, a low-budget, high-quality show widely regarded as one of the best programs ever created in Israel. The American version, which stars Gabriel Byrne as busy psychotherapist Paul Weston, has tweaked the script -- a fighter pilot is haunted by having killed civilians in Iraq, for example, instead of the West Bank -- and adds several original episodes. But HBO's In Treatment generally remains faithful to its parent in the Mideast.

The show, which concluded its eight-week second season earlier this month, premiered in 2005. It originated with Hagai Levi, who worked as an editor on the daily telenovellas that are trashy staples of daytime Israeli TV. At the time, American television's Tony Soprano-driven psychotherapy fad was already well under way. Levi, 45, had also studied psychology and been in treatment himself, providing the nucleus for the idea.

Aiming for the addictive potential of a soap but jettisoning the tepid dialogue and melodrama, Levi gambled that Israelis would be willing to watch an intellectual show consisting of little more than two people sitting in a room talking to each other -- and would be willing to do that every day. "Working on telenovellas, I saw the power of a daily series, one which becomes part of your routine and your life, and I wanted that," Levi said.

The format Levi came up with was original: For four days each week, the show's therapist, Reuven Dagan, would meet with a different patient, with the same one appearing every week on the same evening. On the fifth day, he would pour his heart out to his own shrink. The untried format was a risk for the cable company broadcasting the show. But it also was easy on the bottom line: With just two actors facing each other in a room, each episode cost a relatively cheap $25,000 to produce.

The show included some of the country's most beloved actors. Ayelet Zurer, who appeared in Steven Spielberg's Munich, played Naama, a seductive young woman whose interest in Dagan exceeds professional help. In the American version, the character, renamed Laura, is played by Melissa George. For Dagan, the producers chose an actor seen as embodying something of the quintessential Israeli: Assi Dayan, the talented and famously dissolute son of Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed general who was the quintessential Israeli of an older and more heroic generation.

What allowed Betipul to be translated with relative ease for a U.S. audience was its tendency to shy away from overtly Israeli themes, like conflict with Palestinians, in favour of personal problems that would be familiar to anyone living in a Western country. For Levi, the show's creator, Betipul was never a distinctively Israeli show, though it did have Jewish undertones. Levi grew up in a religious home and attended seminaries where studies centered on ancient Jewish legal texts like the Talmud. "There is certainly something Talmudic about the back-and-forth, question-and-answer format of the show," he said.

Selling the show to HBO marks a coming of age for Israel's TV industry, said Yaron Ten Brink, television critic for the Israeli mass circulation daily Yediot Ahronot. "People were sceptical -- they said if the idea was that good the Americans would have thought of it already," Ten Brink said. "This shows that a small industry without a lot money can develop strokes of brilliance with a low budget and do something that hasn't been seen before."

Levi used personal contacts in the U.S. television industry to get HBO's attention, and once the network's people had a look at his show they needed little convincing, said Rodrigo Garcia, executive producer of In Treatment. "The nature of the problems and conflicts it portrayed was elementary ... and universal, and we always thought it could very well translate to other cultures," Garcia stated.

Some alterations were made to make the characters more believable as Americans: "Voices and tone changed, of course, because aside from the nature of the conflicts, these were now American characters with different approaches to their problems and to interpersonal communication," according to Garcia. None of HBO's directors or actors viewed the Israeli series so they would have no preconceived notions of what the scenes should look like.

According to HBO, the show's episodes each average 2 million viewers. The success of Betipul may reflect Israelis' increasing acceptance of the idea of frequenting a psychiatrist's couch, which has developed as the country evolved from its early spartan and collective days to the more individualistic place it is today. "There is a lot more legitimacy to get help now than at any time in the past," said Dr. Roni Baht, the show's psychological consultant. "Today, there are places in Tel Aviv where if you're not in treatment people assume you lack depth."

The rerun of the repressed

Watching the Israeli TV show Be’Tipul, on which HBO based its captivating new melodrama In Treatment, is like subjecting the American program to psychotherapy suggests Virginia Heffernan. You get to witness the formative inner workings of a mysterious and seductive patient. You gaze directly into its unconscious, from which all its weird habits and preoccupations and virtues and torments presumably arise. Be’Tipul makes clear that In Treatment is American only on the surface. Its psyche is entirely Israeli.

Soon after its premiere in Israel in August 2005, Be’Tipul won a huge audience and critical beatification. Each episode offers a single fictional psychodynamic therapy session — essentially, a one-act, two-person play. In force are the beguiling, if antiquated, first principles of psychoanalysis. Freud’s elegant theories of repression, family romance and erotic transference may seem dated or irrelevant to contemporary American audiences, but they also offer intense narrative pleasures, like those of well-composed science fiction. Just as the cybernetic Cylons on Battlestar Galactica have certain defining strengths and limitations, so the perfectly Freudian mortals on Be’Tipul — a shrink and his patients — come equipped with features (complexes, neuroses, hysteria) as much as full-fledged personalities.

In January, In Treatment made its debut in the United States. It was a risk for HBO. Americans don’t typically embrace psychological hocus-pocus, served straight and unsatirically; therapy sessions on The Sopranos, for example, were notable for their futility. And yet even sceptics who take a drag of In Treatment can find real intoxication. Self-assured, rule-bound, ritualistic dramas that don’t purport to be realism — Lost, Mad Men, Big Love, game and reality shows — are just what I want from television. I love In Treatment. I’d forgotten how exciting the whole bizarre Freudian drama can be.

But are Americans and Israelis watching the same show?

Yes and, of course, no. In Treatment represents an extremely faithful— not to say lazy — nearly word-for-word adaptation of Be’Tipul. The dialogue on the American show is really little more than a straight translation of the Hebrew. Not surprisingly, though, the production values have been increased for HBO. The shrink’s threadbare linoleum-tiled office is now heavily threaded; rough complexions have been buffed and polished with premium-cable makeup; the show’s sound mix has been sweetened, turning the acoustics of the shrink’s office from those of a police interrogation room to those of a private library.

Everything looks and sounds, in short, richer on HBO — especially the beleaguered therapist. In Be’Tipul, Reuven (the brilliant Assi Dayan) is rumpled, sweaty and overweight. On In Treatment, he’s Gabriel Byrne as the dashing and fit Paul, sumptuously dressed in clothes rumpled only enough to make it clear they’re not permanent press. The décor of Paul’s office is vintage shrink-magisterial: Tabriz rugs, soft inherited sofas and walls of impressive books and collectibles.

To hear Paul, in Byrne’s apparently irrepressible Irish brogue, deliver lines originally uttered by Reuven — in Israel — is to ask your brain to make several adjustments. Why does Paul, for instance, offer coffee and tea to his patients? And why does he so regularly provide blankets, hugs, changes of clothing? All this seems way too intimate and lawsuit-baiting for a therapist in the United States. On a show about psychotherapy, and only about psychotherapy, this lapse from verisimilitude must be significant. Isn’t that the point — that there are no accidents?

To make sense of the coffee, for instance, I changed my picture of Paul (he serves his patients abjectly, like a flight attendant, which also encourages dependence) when it seems, from the looks of Be’Tipul, that I may simply not have understood the conventions of Israeli therapists. And when it comes to Paul’s patient Alex — a Navy pilot who accidentally bombed a madrassa in Iraq — the cultural collisions become even more problematic. Alex (Blair Underwood) is the American answer to Yadin (Lior Ashkenazi), a swaggering soldier who, in Be’Tipul, has accidentally injured some children in Ramallah. Alex is being treated in part for his repressed guilt. At first, the analogy seems to track: both Alex’s and Yadin’s nations contend with ambivalence over their conflicts with Muslim populations. But when Alex resolves (preposterously) to pop over to Iraq to find closure by seeing his victims (just as Yadin has visited Ramallah for the same reason), the differences between the Israeli and American circumstances come into relief. America’s war is so far off as to seem, often, abstract. Israel’s war — and enemy — is only a day trip away.

Another awkward adaptation involves a couple who come to Paul in anguish over a pregnancy. The man wants to keep the baby; the woman wants an abortion. In the Israeli version, the couple have to make a presentation before what the English subtitles call an “abortion committee” in order to justify a decision to terminate the pregnancy. Planning this presentation consumes the pregnant woman’s first few sessions. But on In Treatment, the “committee” is only Paul himself. Too bad. How hard would it have been to introduce an anti-abortion family or community sitting in judgement on this couple? Perhaps that would have raised American religious and class issues that In Treatment was not prepared to explore.

At the same time, these cultural incongruities also produce an effect that suits In Treatment: they turn it eerie. The words and problems and solutions of another nation — one passably like ours, but different in both details and moral emphasis — are ventriloquized by people dressed up to look American. This body-snatching is disconcerting, but ultimately ingenious, as it magnifies the hall-of-mirrors aspect of classical therapy, in which the patient is talking to the therapist (who is really her father) who is thinking about his own therapist (who is really his wife).

So on In Treatment we actually see Israelis, posing as Americans, speaking about their hearts, minds and even violence in the Middle East. And it’s all ours to analyse. Is the violence the patients speak of projected internal violence? The violence within — or even between — America and Israel? Or is it the violence of translation?

In Treatment on the couch

Dr. Paul Weston looks normal. He lives in a nice house, where his patients come for therapy. He listens, he zeros in on their problem, he walks them to the door. But underneath, as viewers of HBO's In Treatment know by now, he might have as many -- or more -- problems than his patients.

Presented as a nightly soap opera, the show has become a guilty habit for those familiar with the subtext of therapy, argues Lynn Smith. Among the most addicted are therapists themselves who admit to some intense feelings, pro and con, about the drama. "It's like liver and onions," said Encino psychoanalyst Phillip A. Ringstrom. "People either love it or hate it." Some love it and hate it. Some started out hating it and now love it -- and vice versa.

Already some analysts have scheduled an In Treatment panel for March 9, with show runner Rodrigo Garcia and others, on "Responding to Erotic Transference" at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. Another New York group held a "psychoanalytic salon" last week to discuss issues raised by the television show, which presents a fly-on-the-wall look at a troubled therapist's sessions with his troubled patients. One real-life patient said he relates to the show's patients and compared his emotional growth favourably, said Beverly Hills therapist Cara Gardenswartz. "He is able to see objectively . . . what they are unable to see," she said. Others have introduced a personal issue indirectly by referring to one of the patients' issues.

On the other hand, some therapists worry that Weston (played to repressed perfection by Gabriel Byrne) behaves unethically and fear the nightly soap-style drama could hurt business by reinforcing stereotypes that therapists have as many, if not more, problems than their patients. "If managed care didn't wreck us, then In Treatment will do the trick," said Rosalind S. Dorlen, a Summit, N.J., psychologist. They say Weston discloses too much and crosses boundaries with his patients: Laura, a doctor who's mad about him; Sophie, a suicidal gymnast; Alex, a narcissistic Navy pilot; and Amy and Jake, a jealous couple caught in a cycle of rage and remorse. These patients are unusually aggressive and resistant, slamming doors, arguing, bringing in their own coffee makers.

And when at the end of the week, a visibly less compassionate Weston unburdens himself to Gina, a fellow therapist, she responds harshly. "She's far too intrusive and critical to be a helpful therapist or supervisor," said Dr. Glen Gabbard, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and author of "Psychiatry and the Cinema." He said therapists in his clinic told him, "I'd never go to someone who's so critical of me."

In Treatment has averaged only 320,000 viewers, not a large number even by cable standards. Yet in a time when pharmacology has gained ground in treating problems, what happens behind the closed doors of therapy still has the power to fascinate. "Not since The Sopranos have I seen so many therapists talking to each other about a show," Gabbard said. "If I walk down the hall, I'm stopped by four or five therapists asking, 'What did you think of last night's session?' 'What is going on with Dianne Wiest [who plays Weston's therapist]?' 'Is this therapy? Is this consultation? Is this supervision?' 'Is it chitchat between two people who hate each other and try to make up?' "

At first, therapist Gardenswartz found the show both depressingly realistic and annoyingly unrealistic. By the end of the third week, however, she had noticed "parallel process" in Weston's mimicking Laura's complaints in his sessions with Gina. "Now, we have something," Gardenswartz said. Some therapists said they plan to use clips of the show in postdoctoral courses to illustrate professional issues that arise in real-life sessions: Should therapists make coffee? Or start a couple's session when only one person has arrived?

Because real therapeutic sessions are private, media portrayals inordinately impress the public, patients and therapists themselves, Gabbard said. "We tend to internalize the media portrayals and carry them within as internal templates," he said. The profession has complained about simplistic, clownish or evil therapist characters for years. To find an unquestionably positive media portrayal, therapists had to go back to 1980's Ordinary People where Judd Hirsch's character helped Timothy Hutton's Conrad recover lost memories. "One young resident told me that he had used an exact line from the therapist in Ordinary People and it seemed to work well with his patient," Gabbard said.

In movie and television psychotherapy, conventions call for the therapist to dramatically recover repressed emotionally cathartic memories, he said. "The therapist always has as many problems as the patients. And a woman therapist always sleeps with the male patient, with The Sopranos being a big exception," he said. Also, something has to happen besides two people sitting in a room, talking. "More people get up and use the bathroom in the middle of a session in one week of Dr. Weston's practice than in 30 years of my own practice," he said.

The Sopranos' open-minded and serious Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) represented a pivotal turning point for therapists on television. "I heard that after The Sopranos was running for a couple of seasons, more men started going into psychotherapy," said Ringstrom, who wrote a running commentary on Slate as one of the "Four Shrinks." Until In Treatment, however, many therapists didn't like the wave of television therapists who followed Melfi. According to Gabbard, "Huff didn't get into the actual therapy or the patients' inner lives. State of Mind was the same. The main focus was the wacky zoo that inhabited the house where a bunch of really screwed-up people with no boundaries did strange things played for laughs." And HBO's Tell Me You Love Me "made the terrible mistake of showing explicit sex scenes in a highly clinical way," he said. "One of the good things of In Treatment is that it shows how much more erotic it can be to talk about it."

Some of the show's flaws can be chalked up to the Israeli series from which In Treatment was largely translated. "When they translated the show into English, they left the words, but some of it comes across differently here," said Lewis Aron, director of the New York University post-doctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. "They kept talking about the wall, and the violation of boundaries," that played out in Israel as a literary metaphor, he said. "The wall in Israel is the wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis. That's a country that's all about the violation of boundaries," he said.

What's more, part of Weston's struggle comes from the sort of therapy he's shown to practice -- what Ringstrom called a "method of suspicion" popular over the last 50 years. "He comes out of an old tradition in psychotherapy where 'the customer is always wrong.' Basically it's whatever the patient is saying is suspect. So on the one hand, he is very caringly getting them to open themselves up to him, and then he's playing gotcha." Now, Ringstrom said, many therapists practice hermeneutics, in which what a patient says is understood as the best they can do at the time. "You're helping them deepen their understanding but not necessarily always suspecting they're trying to con themselves, or you," he said.

Aron, who sponsored the New York salon, said one reason he likes In Treatment is that it at least shows "seriousness and depth of thinking about life and relationships." But that's not all.

"The main reason I like it is that I'm so relieved every night that those patients are his and not mine."

Here is psychologist, author and theoretician Robert W. Firestone's opinion about the psychotherapy deployed In treatment style.