TV Review: ‘In Treatment’ Season 2 – “Week One”

The first week of season two of HBO’s show “In Treatment” is an excellent reintroduction to what made this show such a resounding success in its first season.

First off, for those of you who do not know, “In Treatment” is a half-hour show.   One episode per night, five nights per week.   In each episode, we sit in on a session with psychotherapist, Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne), and one of his patients.   Over the course of a season, some 40-45 episodes, we witness the evolution of Paul’s relationship with these patients, and, likewise, we witness Paul’s own issues coming into play.

This season starts off with one of those issues right off the bat.   Paul is awakened by a knocking at his door.   He is recently divorced and is now living/running his business out of a Brooklyn apartment.   The man at the door is Alex Sr., father of Alex Jr. (Blair Underwood), a fighter pilot who may or may not have committed suicide late last season.   Alex’s family feels Paul is responsible for Alex’s state of mind when he was killed, and, as such, they are bringing a malpractice lawsuit against the psychologist.

Preoccupied with the lawsuit, as well as having a history with his litigator (Hope Davis), Paul must continue with his practice.   This season, he has to deal with a April (Alison Pill), an college student with lymphoma who feels she does not need cancer treatment; Oliver (Aaron Shaw), a 12-year-old whose parents are getting a rather heated divorce; and Walter (John Mahoney), a corporate CEO who apparently suffers from severe panic attacks.   Paul will also be returning to his own psychologist, Gina (Dianne Weist), as he tries to make heads or tails of his life and the way in which he views his patients.

“In Treatment” is an incredible show, subtly written and as dramatic or as intense as any show about hard-edged cops or crime scene units.   It takes a precise level of writing and filmmaking to derive this much drama from two people sitting in a room talking about their lives.   The people behind “In Treatment” know just how to pull every bit of intensity out of the conversations we see.   Just the way certain scenes play out are masterfully done.

This is particularly the case this season when April lets Paul know her “secret.”   She doesn’t want to come right out and say, “I have cancer.”   She writes it down on a piece of paper, folds it up, and passes it across the room to Paul.   He reads it, and even then, we don’t get a contrived piece of dialogue where he tells us exactly what he has read.   This is real conversation between two very real lifelike people, and they speak as if there isn’t an audience watching them converse.

That is another masterful thing about “In Treatment.”   Nothing is handed to us as an audience.   We are forced to watch every episode and pull our own opinions out of what we have seen.   No issues are easily resolved or even easily diagnosed on this show, and the intelligence with which the writers piece the episodes together is noticeable.

Just like last season with the couple who were having their issues that made George and Martha from ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ look like George and Judy Jetson, when we are given two opposing sides of an issue, we aren’t hand-fed which one is right and which one is wrong.   That is because, in life, issues aren’t easily resolved either.   When we see two people arguing, there isn’t a clear-cut answer as to who is right and who is wrong.   The people behind “In Treatment” know this, and they instill this level of realism in every minute of every episode.