HBO renews 'In Treatment'

Great news, particularly around these parts: HBO has ordered a third season of "In Treatment," to begin filming early next year and airing sometime later in 2010. Gabriel Byrne is still the star, HBO hopes to have Paris Barclay back as lead director and executive producer, and the new writing showrunners (replacing Warren Leight, who himself replaced Rodrigo Garcia) will be actor-turned-Oscar-nominated-screenwriter (for "Capote") Dan Futterman and his wife, Anya Epstein. Too early to say which, if any, of Paul's previous patients will return (including Dianne Wiest as Gina, I suppose). Given the real-life relationship of the new creative team, I wonder if Paul will be doing more couples therapy, or less. Click here to read the full post

'Mental' can't stack up to 'In Treatment' - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review Fox's "Mental," which has the unfortunate timing to be debuting the night after the finale to the brilliant second season of "In Treatment":

There are times when it's hard to watch a lot of HBO without turning into a snob about traditional network TV. Watch enough of "The Wire," and the "CSI"s and "Law & Order"s feel terribly flimsy in comparison. "The Sopranos" has created an uphill battle for other shows about organized crime that's nearly impossible to climb. And having just finished watching the second season of HBO's incredible therapy drama "In Treatment," I had a hard time doing anything but laughing at Fox's new "Mental."

Hope you all had a good Memorial Day weekend. Will get into the summer groove within a day or so, hopefully. Click here to read the full post

In Treatment: Season two post-mortem with Warren Leight

We've come to the end of season two of "In Treatment," and I'm going to do something a little different at the end. Rather than do my brief sketches of each patient, I spoke at length with showrunner Warren Leight about how each story ended, the season as a whole, deviations from the Israeli series, and the possibility of getting more amazing adventures of Dr. Paul Weston, with or without this specific group of patients.

It's long, so if you just want to get to discussing how the five storylines ended, I understand if you just jump to the comments. But Warren offers a lot of insight, as you might expect the head deity of this particular fictional universe to do.

I want to start with the ending, with Paul ending his therapy with Gina, and Gina making it clear she won't take him back yet again. Given how integral Gina is to the show, and that there have been all these rumblings about how exhausted Gabriel (Byrne) finds doing it, should we take that to mean that this was written as a series finale?

No. When we were shooting, and even now, we have no idea if the show's coming back, and/or if Gina's character comes back. I've received no input from anyone on that. It's always fair to an audience (to provide an ending), but you never know. It has the potential to be closure if that's how it goes. I wouldn't think this is the first time these two have said "Never darken my door again." Clearly, something is wrong in their therapy process. I think therapists call it dual role. They need to unclot their lives a little bit. I think it's fine for Paul to leave the nest. I don't even know if the show's coming back, let alone who'll be with it.

Well, the first season was so exhausting that Rodrigo (Garcia, who adapted the show from the Israeli "Be'Tipul" and ran season one) passed the reins to you. If it comes back for a third season, would you be up for it?

That's the big debate within my family at the moment. The last four five weeks of this thing, I never put in less than 100 hours a week -- and I've been sick about 3 times since the shoot stopped. Creatively, it's great to get to work with those actors and those writers. There was a degree of autonomy because of the pace. But it's extremely difficult, if I didn't publish three episodes, we fell behind. The notion that you're burning through an episode every two days, it's just horrifying. When I tell other showrunners, they're like, "You're f---ing kidding me."

I would love to see a slightly elongated shooting schedule, where you could shoot four days and have done day to rehearse, tone and edit, but there's obviously a price point at which this show doesn't work at HBO. Part of its appeal to HBO is each episode does not cost a lot to shoot. But that's basically because Gabriel and me and a few other people are grinding ourselves. I shouldn't speak for Gabriel, but I'd imagine Gabriel and I have the same sense of pride about the season and utter exhaustion. It doesn't really matter what I want. If Gabriel wants a different schedule, it might have another influence. If I died on the shoot, they might put my name at the end of the credits, "In Memoriam," and move on. Physically, doing it was disastrous.

HBO, it must be a difficult decision for them. It hasn't been a breakout hit. I don't know the numbers, nobody seems to understand the numbers, but it is a show that people are catching up with. This is never going to have the mass appeal of the breakout hits that made them HBO, and yet it's getting very nice reception. It's a little like AMC with "Mad Men," I suppose, except HBO has other shows. There is a possibility of a season three, and artistically, the least of the issues is,"'Could you pull it off?" I don't think the challenge is can you come up with four more patients for Paul. I don't think we've exhausted the people who could come to see him or where he is. I just think we've exhausted ourselves.

Just in case, though, you brought everyone's story to a kind of an ending. Even Mia and Walter, who are staying in therapy, are at a point where the therapy might not be that interesting from a TV perspective.

Remember the last line of "Portnoy's Complaint": "Now vee may perhaps to begin?" I think you sense that, in a weird way, Walter in week 7 is his first therapy session, where he finally allows himself to be there, and Mia in week 7 starts with "I'm leaving," but allows herself to realize she needs to be there. Who knows if they're going to be all right, but they're going to keep trying.

Oliver, when we started talking about Oliver early on, one therapist said one of the toughest things about doing therapy with kids is an adult can keep having some control over his environment, but a kid keeps going back into a toxic environment and can't do anything about it. That stayed with me. You know where Oliver is going, but the kid still has a tough road.

It became clear after a while with Oliver that his only real problem was his parents -- that if Paul could somehow fix those two, Oliver would be just fine.

I like that episode 6 where the kid says, "They'd both better off without me," and on some level, he's picked up on his parents worst secret. The kid's childhood is, I think, about to be over, but at least there was a connection to Paul, and a healthy one at that. It's a strange thing trying to wrap these things. It's like trying to land a jetliner. In the Israeli version, almost everyone ended with a hug. I thought, "We can't do that," so we ended up with a mix.

Last week was obviously designed to be the darkness before the dawn, and there was a lot of discussion on the blog about how many of the patients Paul was actually helping.

I'd like to think that Paul helped all of them. It was designed for Mia to hit bottom. It's week 6. A number of therapists have said it's not unusual. It does take a while, if you hit bottom in week 2, you have nowhere to go. Hitting bottom is sometimes how the process begins to turn around. Week 7 is, for some of them, a legitimate beginning, and for some of them, it could be a dead cat bounce. If they are not better, this season, it's nothing where Paul's impairments screwed up the therapy. That was another goal I was hoping to achieve. Oliver, I think he did a pretty professional job, and the kid's parents are just not able to see past their needs right now. There's a hint in week 7 that now that the couple's done, at least they won't be at it. You can hope for a better day for the kid. I hate to be "Blame the parents, not the therapist," but it doesn't feel to me like Paul really blew it, like he got so attracted to Bess that he did this. There's a reality to it: you can do your job well -- there's a meta, you can do your job well and the show can still not get picked up -- and people's circumstances can change.

April is on the road to a physical recovery, which is probably the most important thing for her. Emotionally, I don't think she's ready to do what she needs in therapy.

You didn't write the first season, where Alex died, but since his death hangs over so much of this season, let me ask you what you think: was his suicide Paul's fault?

There's moments in this season where he says, "I misunderstood Alex's anger." The larger question is what does Paul think? I think Paul's anger at Alex, I think the affair interfered with his judgment, with Laura, Paul's feelings for Laura interfered with the treatment. I don't think you can say the suicide was his fault, but that wasn't his proudest moment as a therapist. I think that's going to haunt Paul for a long time. You can only let yourself off the hook. Paul has a couple of moments in the season where he flat-out says to Gina, he spells out his reasons for guilt. When Walter says "You've got blood on your hands," I know you can't save everybody, but that's hardly a good treatment. There was too much going on between them, and Paul was unable to handle his own transference there. If he had lost Walter, that would have been tough for him. If you lose a patient a season, that's just not good. He will have a degree of guilt, or sense of guilt about Alex for the rest of his life.

You told me last week that Walter didn't attempt suicide in the Israeli show. Where did that story go instead?

The Israeli show stopped tracking Walter after week 4 and switched over to the daughter. I asked Hagai (Levi, creator of "Be'Tipul") about that. It seemed like he was heading for suicide. I guess week 5 it was just one on one, Paul and Walter's daughter, and week 6 was Paul and the daughter and Walter trying to reconcile. I talked to Hagai and said, 'What happened there?" He said he thought it'd be interesting, I said, 'You can't introduce a new character here! That's cheating.' My psychoanalysis of what the Israeli writers were thinking is, the next episode would have been his suicide attempt, and none of them wanted to go there. Because they were all writing about their dad in some way... It was getting to a very dark place with Walter, so they brought in the daughter and talked about lesbianism and India. Mike Leigh films can sometimes get away with that, but we couldn't.

In a weird way, the show is writing the stuff you don't want to write, and going to places you would rather avoid. On top of that, it was fascinating to do the hospital scene. And we built a set, which we've never done, and there was Mahoney, staring out the window, that shot was gorgeous, that was the director, Jean de Segonzac's choice. Walter really was tough in that episode, and I thought, 'Okay.' It was kind of great. Obviously, you could play that whole episode weepy or tough. I had written it where he'd get tough again and say "Get out, get out," but I had assumed there'd be a larger loss of dignity before that, and I thought, 'This is probably correct.' This wasn't about Mahoney's chops; he can do anything. I messed myself up with the week 6 episode, I got very sad writing it, and I thought, 'Okay, this will work.' It was interesting, because it's about missing your life, and that sense of the loss of your true self early on. Boy, did it resonate on the set with a lot of the older guys. Men, you're not supposed to acknowledge that. But seeing Mahoney weep there, and looking around, and there was a DP all screwed up, he'd just lost his dad. It was worth the wait. Who am I to tell Mahoney? You bring John Mahoney in, you listen to him. And he's, in a way, the most people pleasing actor I've worked with.

Were there any similar situations where the other guest actors were taking the characters in directions you didn't anticipate?

With Alison (Pill) and Hope (Davis), you don't get rehearsal time on this, but they would come in for a read-through, and I would always take their notes. I trust the collaborative process a lot. If there's one good thing I get from theater. I had Edie Falco in "Side Man" (Leight's Tony-winning play), and if something couldn't work for her, it usually meant that her instincts were right and my writing was wrong. Gabriel, too, in the morning, if something wasn't working, if you do 35 of these, you better be able to figure out when he's not happy. It's one of the more collaborative shows. The downside is you're shooting in two days and trying to do it like a play where you rehearsed for four weeks.

With Hope, the original conception of Mia was a much more overtly ethnic character, and then Hope was available, and she was too good an actress not to take. Then it becomes somebody like Martha Stewart, who was ethnic once, and has become something else, at some cost to herself. Alison, by the time you get to week 4, 5 and 6, everyone's in sync. I just watched and waited for something not to work and tried to figure out what the problem is.

Dianne Wiest did not want to judge Paul, and that became tricky for me. There were also times when people had certain reactions, and you don't let go of the reins. Dianne didn't want to judge, criticize, and if I had taken every one of Dianne's notes, there would have been no conflict at all. I started to write about the Buddha-like place she was coming from. The big mistake I made from week 1 was they both sat on the couch together, and there's such a huge difference in the energy. She wanted to do that again, and I couldn't let that happen again. It's a give and take, and then at the end of the day, I've gotta figure it out on the set.

One of the things you did more often this year than last was to give us glimpses of Paul's other, less interesting patients, and to show how much less engaged he was with them.

One of the things I liked was that these are the four who are getting to him. Therapists will do 30-50 hours a week of this stuff. I thought it was interesting to have therapists talk about, "You have your narcissists, and they come back every week, and they don't get better, but it's stable income." I thought it would be interesting to get a larger picture of Paul's life, every now and then have a little bit of humor. And also the notion of Oliver seeing a happy couple. It's such a claustrophobic world, those little extra glimpses. I enjoyed them, I think everybody enjoyed them. The lesbian couple in the last Walter episode, the Caucasian lesiban was played by Jackie Reingold, who had written all the Mia episodes.

And whenever you did an episode, or a scene, that wasn't in therapy, it was still structured like a therapy scene.

I don't know why I made that a rule, but I felt it's less of a cheat, if it's only two people in a room together. Walter in the hospital room, Mia in her office. It should always be a one-on-one, Paul at his dad's bedside, Paul with Tammy, a relationship that was obviously doomed. He's not ready emotionally. For some reason, that was important to me. Otherwise, I worried it was too jarring. You can imagine an hour-long series of this on network, there'd be a session, and a scene at the bar where they're all hanging out. It'd be a different kind of show.

Well, I was just watching this new Fox show, "Mental," that's about a psychiatric hospital, and you get a little bit with the patient, and then you cut away to banter between the supporting cast, then to another case -- there's a lot of respite there.

I had actually written a (network) pilot a few years ago about a family therapist whose personal life was in a shambles. I know what that rhythm would be, and you would never be allowed the intensity of these 20-minute one-act plays. That's a lot of time for two characters to be talking.

It's a lot more intense than the network version would be.

I was on "Criminal Intent" for six years. We did some very good stuff there, but it's the third one of a tired genre. There are 11 million viewers at times, or even 5 million, which is a number we'll never get, and I get more response to this than I ever did from "Criminal Intent." The people who plug into this show are in trouble, I think. It's a much more visceral experience.

I imagine it'd be tough to go back to writing something like "Criminal Intent" after doing this.

Among the things I didn't have to worry about were act-outs. "You're pregnant," cut to commercial. I still tried to have a structure but didn't have to worry about that. I didn't ever want one of those actors to get a bad script. I'm not saying I didn't disappoint them, but I didn't want to disappoint them. It's an intense process, and I just never wanted to hand Mahoney or Hope a bad script. It's like having master musicians come in: you want to have a score for them. I've had the other grind. It would be a tricky transition. Maybe it's a challenge. I think "Mad Men" pulls it off -- I think that's why people say ("In Treatment") is the best show on the air, because ("Mad Men" is) not on right now. You can do it, but it's not easy. This was really good writers, really good actors, really good crew killing themselves -- and a lot of corporate anxiety.

How do you mean?

We made a lot of changes. The relocation, a little opening things up, more exteriors. HBO, I'm sure, and (producer) Stephen Levinson, they were nervous, because season one had the Laura/Paul "Is he or isn't he?" and that has an obvious appeal to an audience, and they were very worried that you can't compete with "Is he going to f--k her or not?" Also, I had wanted him to be functioning better, last year there were more outbursts in a way. The way he would push Alex. We didn't do as much overt malfunctioning of Paul, and that made them nervous. There was a fear, at times, you were smoothing out too much. And because we were shooting out of sequence, they didn't know it was going somewhere. It was somewhat less histrionic. The Mia character was sexualized, but it wasn't as overtly titilating. That has to be scary if you're a network that has a show that people praise but a lot of people don't watch, and you're taking some sex out of it. We changed the location, moved him away from his family, gave Gina a waiting room set, set some boundaries -- there were a lot of e-mails and phone calls for a long time. I don't blame 'em.

I hope they were happy with the result of all those changes.

I'm sure they are. I think, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but it'll help if it garners more nominations and awards. People don't always trust their impulses. My life got easier when the reviews started to come out. There was fear, and anxiety, that's all. Richard Plepler has always been very proud of this season. But Steve Levinson, who does "Entourage" and is the Dick Wolf of this show, there are things he wishes were different, where we respectfully disagree. I think there was a worry that he was becoming too much the therapist this year. And as the show went on, you got to know more and more about him, and the conflicts were clearer. It's more dramatic to have a guy fighting one of his patients and trying to sleep with another. But, boy, do that two years in a row...

He wasn't fighting the patients, but he seemed even more combative with Gina this year -- especially since he seemed so calm the other four days of the week.

Unfortunately, we shot out of sequence, so we didn't do Gina week 3 until we'd done Mia week 6. He was functioning better at the job and was purging out of him in those sessions. And that's a choice (Gabriel) made, that I was fascinated. The way Gabriel played those scenes, there'd be another example -- I didn't know they were going to play that hot. And there was never any rehearsal, the day of, the two of them arrive, and usually you shoot the guest actor first and then turn around and get to Gabriel and he's talking about his father and his mother, and you go, 'Oh, that's not what I heard, but that's very good.' That went with the lonely life he's leading this year, and in terms of the transference. A lot of reasons for it, and it was sort of fascinating to watch. Maybe Gabriel knows more than I do about what Paul would do in this situation. I used to love when directors would try to give him a big acting note about Paul.

What would happen?

On a good day, he would just nod. On another day, I was standing next to him when he got an incredibly complicated note -- "Now, you're playing this 20 percent understanding that this really means he misses his father, and 10 percent..." -- just this unplayable note, the director walked away, I smiled at Gabriel, said, "Are you good to go?" he said, "I'll just give a blank look. It'll work." And he gave a blank look, and the director liked it, because he thought the note had been taken.

I liked that, near the end of the final April episode, we get to hear more about Sophie.

That came from a writer's assistant, this guy John Haller. You want to have a smart support staff. The piano music Mia played in one episode, that was our script supervisor. But John read that script, tossed that idea out, and (Sarah) Treem and I went, "That's a very good idea, young John." He said there was an overlap between the two characters, and it would be sweet, and it just went right in. And in a way, it provides a little closure on season one, and there's an echo of Sophie in April, for a variety of reasons. And I'm glad when Paul gets a little bone every once in a while. We beat the crap out of him this year. That was not in the Israeli show, the original draft or my rewrite, but it came from the writer's assistant.

One of my readers suggested that if Paul had been the idiot April assumed he would be when she entered therapy, she would have gotten bored with him and gone to chemo on her own. But instead, she got caught up with him, and needed him to make her go.

I don't know that she would have gone for herself. I like to think Paul had that effect on her. There's a suicidal side to that character: "It's better for me to wake up dead than upset my family." I don't agree with that (interpretation). That's a possible interpretation, I don't know that she would have gone on her own. She got lucky with Paul. And even with Paul, it took her four weeks. I don't see it. But I do love there are different ways of viewing these characters.

And by taking her to chemo, he effectively destroys any chance of continuing as her therapist.

The therapy is ruined at that moment. I imagine he would do that again. That was also interesting for us. That's why April ends where it does. The relationship, if it wasn't dead then, was dead when he called her mother. And he must have known it would be.

There's a similar thing with Oliver, where he asks to live with Paul. And Paul can't say yes because it'd cross a line, but also, I think, because he knows he wouldn't do right by Oliver once he stopped being his therapist and started being his dad.

There's a line where Paul says, "I can't do it," and he says it really quickly. That was an interesting moment. The more professional answer there. Part of him must have wanted to say, "Okay," as insane as that would be. But he's got that flaw, I guess. Some of what Gina says to him in week 7 is true. Maybe that's the lesson he needed to learn this year: you don't save them.

I imagine that's a choice he made with April. That was another acting moment: Gabriel on the set in week 4, it had been written more therapeutically, the moment where he takes her, and he started playing it father/daughter. It was a little tricky on the set, but we stripped away all the jargon, and he was a father saving a daughter. "I'm telling you you're going now." He immediately played it that way, and then I, as quickly as possible, rewrote it to support that. I thought it was a really brilliant instinctive choice on his part. This isn't about therapy -- "For f--k's sake, I can't sit there and let her die." And I thought, "Oh, yes, our mistake." But therefore he's lost his therapeutic neutrality and become a surrogate parent. Once you've lost that therapeutic neutrality, it's like once you've slept with somebody, you can't go back to the way it was.

Before the season, we talked about whether Walter, at his age, is better off for having to examine an unexamined life, and you have that line in the week 6 episode where the other therapist suggests Paul shouldn't have opened Pandora's Box.

I don't think Paul opened it. He has that line: "This is the last thing I would have wanted for you." I thought about this a lot. My dad played trumpet his whole life, and he developed the first signs of Parkinson's, it affected his playing, we didn't even know it was Parkinson's. And suddenly he was depressed, but the truth was, he was depressed his whole life, but he had his horn. Here was this 70 year old trumpet player who couldn't play his trumpet going to therapy for the first time. It was glacial, but in the end, the last years of his life were better for it. It was nothing you would have wished on him. That's why that line was written. If the guy had come in and (Paul) could have just knocked it with sleeping pills, he would have. I don't think Paul opened it up -- from week 1, he saw it. If you go back, you see Gabriel observing a lot early on. Maybe there were surprises along the way. But what you get are this guy whose defenses are about to collapse. So now, what do you do? There was no point. You couldn't shore them up anymore. I talked to shrinks. Some shrinks like (the flood), which tells you something, but it's like, you can never get the guy to this point, but if that's where he is when he comes in, it's about managing the crash when it's inevitable, and having enough of an alliance for when they hit bottom, so they have a person who can help them get back together. It would have better for this not to happen to Walter, I suppose. But it's a flood. It's 65 years of denial, or whatever. When those structures break, there's no holding it back. The dam broke, and there was nothing to be done.

But would Walter have gone to Africa to find Natalie if he hadn't been seeing Paul?

I think he was going to Africa also to run away from the crisis. I think that was, in part, a self-destructive act on his part. He has this enormous burden of guilt. I suspect he would have, in some way, precipitated his firing. his firing was inevitable, but going to Africa made it easier. It's Darwinian, when you're weakened in that world. I thought a lot about safari politics. He's the one who was going to take that hit. My belief is, he is better off because Paul was with him during this time. That would be my hope for people viewing it.

You had a lot of shrinks offering you opinions on this show?

You ask 10 shrinks, you get 10 different opinions, all of which disapprove the other 9. It's very strange, the number of shrinks come up to me. The number of people whose spouses turn out to have been therapists. There was something on HBO where they interviewed me and Paris (Barclay), so they know me. I've actually had people come up to me on the street and go, 'You're that guy. You know something? it's unrealistic. There'd be many more silences in a session.' And I go, 'I appreciate it, but it's a drama. We have silences, but if we just do silences, people wouldn't watch.' They get upset about Gina and Paul, there are too many boundaries that have been crossed in the past. But I think, 'Okay, it is Dianne Wiest.' They're not taking into account my issues. But also, would Paul have gone to someone else last year?

Do you have any idea when HBO might make a decision on a third season?

No, and it's an anxiety. Right now, for me and a lot of the writers, the next two weeks is musical chairs in terms of hiring for next season, and if the music stops...? I'm as anxious as any of the fans are to know. If you could find out, that'd be great. I've heard wildly differing rumors. It will come down to budget more than anything. There is no season 3 in Israel, so it means this season would be somewhat costlier, because the writers would have to be paid respectfully. And every season goes up (in cost). I think it will come down to things beyond my control. I don't know what else we could have done, and I don't mean that in an a--hole way. If I was a network, I would be jerking me around, too.

At the very least, it feels like that's a good season. I feel okay about it. But it'd be tricky to go back to doing something else. Click here to read the full post

In Treatment: Week six in review

For the next-to-last time this season, I'm going to be looking at all five episodes of "In Treatment" at once, offering a brief overview of the week and then going patient-by-patient. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I'm placed on hold...

"It's not about you, Paul. They're human beings. They're struggling with profound problems. If only you could find courage to sit with the fact that what we do is hard, and sometimes it makes you feel like an idiot. It's a humbling profession, and if you lack anything as a therapist, it's humility." -Gina

Because "In Treatment" is a scripted drama and not a documentary, Paul's makes more progress, and faster progress, than a real therapist would. While he really only "cured" one of last season's patients (Sophie), he consistently achieved breakthroughs with them over the course of that season. (Mr. Prince would argue that Paul was too successful with Alex, which is why his son is dead and not flying jets.) And here, in this shorter season, Paul has done remarkable work with a group of patients who often fight him kicking and screaming every step of the way.

But as Gina says in the line I quoted above, therapy is often a lot trickier than that. The process doesn't always work, the patients don't always want to let it work, and sometimes outside circumstances conspire to prevent Paul from accomplishing much of anything at all.

And so it feels right, and moving, to see a week in which Paul repeatedly, and painfully, smacked up against the limits of his profession, encountered one scenario after another where his training seemed to be of little use. By the end of the week, it was no surprise he was ranting to Gina about his desire to chuck it all and become "a life coach."

Also, while we may be at the it-goes-without-saying point on the genius of these performances, holy cow was everyone amazing this week. A few specific points on that as we go patient-by-patient...

Mia

"Why did she give up? Okay, she was sick for a year. But after that, why didn't she fight harder to be my mother? How come nobody sticks by me?" -Mia

As Paul says to Gina, what can he really do for Mia? The things that Mia wants -- children, and a husband to raise them with -- are almost beyond her now. There's still a chance she could find the right man, and they could adopt, etc., etc., but it'll be a struggle all the way. But at the same time, as Gina notes, the only way Mia even has a chance for that to happen is if Paul can help her learn to let love and affection into her life, to not be so guarded.

Now, when Amy had her miscarriage in Paul's office last season, I didn't like that choice (even though I'm guessing it came from the Israeli version), as I thought the more interesting choice would be for Jake and Amy to realize that a baby didn't come close to curing all the ills of their marriage. But here, I was okay with Mia's condition turning out to be a false positive (does anyone still use the term "hysterical pregnancy"?), because far more than Amy, so much of Mia's unhappiness is genuinely tied up in this lack of a child. Having one wouldn't solve all her problems, either, but it would solve enough of them that, in "In Treatment" terms, it wouldn't give Paul enough to work with to make for good TV.

And while helping her cope with the realization that her fantasy of being a mom was just that, and might always be, Paul also started to make significant progress on helping her deal with the underlying issues that have likely kept her from succeeding in previous relationships. He still hasn't gotten Mia to drop her idealized view of her daddy, but he did at least get her to start re-examining her belief that her mother is to blame for all her problems.

All the patients are, in some ways, a reflection on Paul, and here we got to see him apply a lesson he'd learned from Gina about the unreliability of childhood memory -- of editing your own mental autobiography and learning to believe the altered details -- and show Mia how maybe, just maybe, her mother wanted to reach out to her, but her father made that impossible.

Two great acting moments to highlight here: first Hope Davis as Mia sitting on the couch and debating whether to follow Paul into his office, as if crossing that threshold would make the therapy session real, as opposed to this impromptu waiting room chat she could pretend was just two friends chatting; and then Gabriel Byrne as Paul learning that this was no miscarriage at all and understanding the depths of Mia's pain.

April

"I don't believe in anything anymore. I don't believe in love, or my mother, or my body, or you. Because of all this stupid therapy, I don't even believe in myself anymore. I literally have no idea why I should get out of bed in the morning." -April

Wow.

One of the limitations of the series' format is the difficulty in showing an event like Paul at the hospital with April, calling her mother in. It could have been done, but it would have had to be clumsily shoehorned into someone else's episode. So instead, we learn about it after the fact, as the episode opens with Paul and April as physically far apart in the TV frame as possible, her arms crossed, her attitude sullen and chilly. At first, I assumed she was still mad at him for not wanting to take her to chemo anymore, but instead it was this whole other story, with Paul making a choice to violate the one cardinal request April had made of him.

And I understand why he did it -- just as, I think, April finally did by the end of the session, even though she didn't want to admit it. But her level of anger with him, and his frustration with her, led to some amazingly raw acting from both Byrne and Alison Pill. (Pill also had some hilarious black comic moments, like her delivery of "I don't understand: are you for this woman or against her?" She's at the can-do-no-wrong stage for me.)

What we're seeing here, as we saw last week, and as we'll see in the Oliver episode, is that, while Paul's desire to play savior with his patients is admirable, it also creates problems that a more professionally-distanced therapist like Gina simply wouldn't have. April has come to think of Paul as much more than her therapist, and she feels flat-out betrayed by him. No matter how much she might objectively understand why Paul did what he did, it still hurts too much for her to deal with.

And then comes that moment at the end, when she physically can't get herself up off the couch, and has to ask for help from this man whose help she's not sure she wants anymore. Mortifying, devastating, and brilliantly-played.

Oliver

"You can't help me." -Oliver

And this one hurt -- badly.

With Mia or April or even Walter, Paul at least has the hope that he can do something for them emotionally, even if he can't solve their bigger problem (Mia's loneliness, April's cancer, Walter's career). Here, he has completely and utterly failed to do anything to help Oliver -- not through any fault of his own, but just because Bess and Luke are such selfish, messed-up, oblivious twits that they have created a situation -- where Bess takes Oliver away from the city altogether so she can take this new job -- that no therapist could fix. Paul can rail against them, can cross all kinds of professional lines with them, can flat-out yell, "You have got to figure out a way to look after your son!," but there's no getting through to them. As Oliver realizes, neither of them wants him, and he's stuck with the one who doesn't want him less than the other one.

And the hell of it is, Oliver has grown to like and trust Paul so much that, like April, he can't see him as a doctor anymore, but a father figure. And so of course he pleads with Paul to stay with him, and there's nothing Paul can tell him -- that it's ethically unkosher (I think it is, anyway), or that once Oliver went from being his patient to being his foster son, Paul would likely become just as distant with him as he's been with his own kids -- to ease the pain of being rejected by another parental figure, and especially by the one parental figure who actually seems to like him.

There was a finality to that scene on the playground (beautifully shot by director Paris Barclay) that has me feeling, sadly, like this is the last we'll see of Oliver. Last year, we saw a few episodes towards the end without certain patients, and I could see us getting a "Wednesday" episode in the final week that has nothing to do with Oliver at all. (Maybe Paul's court hearing?)

But dammit, it stinks that it had to come to this for the kid.

Walter

"I'm not supposed to malfunction, Paul. That's for other people." -Walter

Wow, and then double wow.

The closing sequence, with Walter doubled over and bawling and wrapping his arms around Paul's leg like a little boy clutching his daddy, was among the most affecting scenes of this incredible week. In fact, I loved it so much, I asked "In Treatment" showrunner Warren Leight (who's been writing most of the Walter episodes of late) about its origins, since he'd alluded to it when I interviewed him before the season. Here's what he had to say:

The truth is, I had been hoping for Walter to breakdown in front of Paul for a few episodes: week four, right after he'd been fired, and week five, in the hospital after his suicide attempt. What was fascinating to me was Mahoney's first take on those two episodes. His Walter stumbled, but he didn't breakdown. And even stayed confrontational. So, after week four, I wrote week five, set it in the hospital, and waited for a breakdown which never came (the Israeli week five was a one on one session between Paul and Walter's daughter discussing her spiritual quest in India, and her lesbianism, I believe. There was no suicide attempt).

After week five, I thought, Walter's defenses are crumbling, but they are all he has, and he won't go down without a fight. So I wrote week six with that in mind. When I got to the last line from Paul, about how the other Walter is the one who wants to live, I thought, 'OK, this will work.' And it did. We had a long talk on the set about the false self and the true self, and how often people split off from themselves to please others or to survive. This seemed to resonate with both actors.

The grabbing of Paul's leg was a spontaneous gesture on Mahoney's part. After the first take, Gabriel came up to me and Paris and said, basically, "How am I supposed to sit in the chair when the man is falling apart in front of me?" He asked if he could go over to Walter, we said yes, and we all decided not to tell John that would be happening. John reacted in the moment, and I think it's one of their strongest moments. Week seven then had to be rethought, to acknowledge, or deny, what had happened in week six.

John would've gone there earlier if we'd asked, but I trusted his instincts. It would take someone like Walter a very long time and a huge amount of pressure before he'd drop his defenses. Older men don't come to therapy easily.

Am I the only one who finds it really cool that the writer of the episode was trying just as hard to get Mahoney to open up as Paul was trying with Walter? In the end, it all played out perfectly, so I'm glad Mahoney had the instincts he did; Walter crying pre-suicide attempt, or even right after, wouldn't have had nearly as much power as it did after this long wait.

Other than Walter's breakdown, the most interesting part of the episode to me was the comment by Walter's shrink from the hospital, about how Paul maybe opened a Pandora's Box he shouldn't have with Walter. That's what he arguably did with Alex, and what I was worried about in the early episodes of this season. I think the "other Walter" does deserve to come out after all this time, but I can't help but wonder if the Walter who came to Paul as a patient will be better off this way.

Gina

"I really think that you're acting like an a--hole. I really think that you're a therapist who has remarkably little insight into your own behavior. You are so self-absorbed. You are so entitled. You come in here and you spout the same old bulls--t!" -Gina

Triple wow.

What's usually so wonderful about Dianne Wiest's performance as Gina is the extreme control she displays in front of Paul -- both how she manipulates him where she wants him to go, but how she keeps her own emotions buttoned up tight. While Paul is obviously more demonstrative with Gina than he is with his patients, it's more of a matter of degree; it's not stunning that the guy who occasionally loses his patience with the likes of Luke and Bess might explode even more when outside the confines of his role as a therapist. So to see Gina finally, after two seasons of goading from Paul, lose it and unload on him... amazing. I usually take meticulous, near-transcribed notes of these episodes, but when we got to Gina's outburst, I put the computer down, except to jot down an occasional line or two, because I didn't want to miss a second of this when I might be otherwise distracted by making sure my notes were correct.

After all of Paul's failures during the week, Gina argues pretty convincingly for the value of what they do, and hopefully we won't see him asking for the letter back next week. But things got really, fascinatingly, ugly there for a little while, didn't they?

Finally, I want to say that I've written all of the above without watching the final week's worth of episodes. I hope to get to those in the next few days, depending on my Upfront Week schedule, and to maybe talk to Warren Leight for a season post-mortem interview. I don't know what the future is for the show, or for these patients, but it feels like there's too much left to deal with in each case for the show to wrap up anybody's story the way that season one did, in one way or another, with all of its patients. I'd like to think this year leaves things a little more ambiguously, whether or not there's going to be a third season, and whether or not any or all of these four characters would be a part of it.

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In Treatment: Week five in review

Once again, I'm reviewing all five of this week's episodes of "In Treatment" at once, with general thoughts followed by brief takes on each patient. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I look at my watch...

For the first time in the brief history of "In Treatment," the series skips over a week in the lives of Paul and his patients(*), as he returns to work after taking time off to bury and grieve for his father.

(*) In case you didn't know, "In Treatment" itself takes next week off so HBO can debut a documentary series tied to The Alzheimer's Project, with the show coming back on May 17 for the final two weeks of the season. It's unfortunate that HBO couldn't have scheduled the season so that the break fell between weeks 4 & 5 instead of 5 & 6, so we could have experienced the gap right along with Paul's patients. Made too much sense to happen, I guess.

And when Paul comes back, he discovers just how much his patients -- at least, these four patients in crisis, as opposed to more mundane cases like the impotent law student whose session we glimpse at the start of the Oliver episode -- have come to depend on him. For them, he's more than a therapist: he's a surrogate husband, or father, or simply the only thing keeping them alive. He has become the most important figure in each of his patient's lives (maybe Walter less than the others, but he's also better at hiding/denying his true feelings), and when that relationship gets severed, even temporarily, they don't react well.

Paul returns to major developments in every case: Mia is pregnant, April is losing her hair and getting weak from the chemo (though this could at least be predicted), Bess has yet to return home to Oliver, and Walter is in the hospital with "food poisoning." Even the Gina episode comes with a couple of seismic shifts, as Paul tries to reconcile with Kate, and gets a settlement offer from Alex's father.

Mia

"This is me being caring. Is that okay?" -Mia
"You don't have to worry about my feelings." -Paul
"Does anybody?" -Mia

Mia just can't help herself, can she? She has to feel like the most special patient in Paul's practice, and so she's constantly taking advantage of her past history with him, and her firm's present association with him, to get access and information that the other patients don't have. And yet Hope Davis plays her with this tremendous vulnerability and self-awareness that makes it impossible not to like her even when she's being an entitled, intrusive pain. Just look at that lopsided grin she flashes Paul after springing the news of her pregnancy; she is so desperate for his approval, isn't she?

As Mia notes, this seems like kismet: all these years after Paul talked her into aborting the last pregnancy she had (or so she believes), she's come to him with an unexpected, last-chance (and, though it's not discussed here, no doubt high-risk) pregnancy. And even though she claims it's the thing she wanted to make her life complete, she realizes the picture isn't as full as she really, really wants.

For the first time since the premiere episode, Paul is off his game with Mia, so thrown by his father's death that he has a harder time concealing his emotions -- in this case, dismay over her casual attitude about not informing the presumed baby daddy -- in front of her, and even surreptitiously glancing at his inherited wristwatch when her monologue brings him to think about his dad.

And Mia, in turn, drops the remaining pretense about her desire for Paul. She may not want him sexually right now (though with that Irish accent and those baby blues, how could she resist?), but she wants him to be her partner in every other way, enlisting him to help her make every kind of child-rearing decision that would normally fall to the father, instead of just "a father." And he briefly lets her indulge that fantasy, admitting that the two of them as a couple seems like "it could solve all our problems." But all that does -- as Paul was no doubt expecting -- is to lead her to confront her true fears about the pregnancy, and her realization that it was Mia, and only Mia, who decided to get that abortion 20 years ago. And that realization, in turn, helps her make peace, for now, both with that old decision and her desire to see this pregnancy through.

At session's end, she asks Paul to be happy for her, but he can't be happy for anyone or anything right now, unfortunately.

April

"I thought you were going to take care of me." -April

Even more than Mia, April has built Paul up into the be-all, end-all of her existence. She fantasizes about his eyes, has these elaborate imaginary conversations with him about every topic in her day, and, just as Mia expects him to play adoptive father as well as therapist, April assumes he's going to be her physical as well as emotional caretaker during her cancer battle. And the betrayal on her face and in her voice when she realizes Paul has no plans to take her to the next chemo appointment make it clear why he waited so long to offer in the first place. It's not practical, nor fair (to either Paul or to April) to expect that of him, and if that's the only way she's going to go to chemo, that's a huge problem. I don't disagree with his decision last week -- someone needed to get her there, obviously, before she was too ill for it to matter -- but this is exactly what I'm sure he feared when he wasn't dragging her there in week two or three.

Great as the entire cast is, and great as they all are this week, this is Alison Pill's week to shine above all the others. The moment when April, panicked and betrayed by the idea that Paul doesn't want to take her to chemo, tries to get up too quickly and instead doubles over in both physical and emotional agony, ripped me to the core as I watched it. And she was just as brilliant, albeit in subtler fashion, in the episode's quieter moments, like April telling the charming story of how she became friends with Leah ("You can sing or you can hold your penis, but you cannot sing and hold your penis"), even as she doesn't understand, as Paul does, that this is a relationship she can and should be able to rely on in this situation.

Where Paul is guarded when discussing his father with Mia, and a bit irritated as usual at her overstepping the doctor/patient boundaries, he gives the knowledge freely to April. It's because he feels more of a connection with April, but also because he feels like she needs this level of honesty to make her trust him enough to save her life. She doesn't want to talk about the dream she had before her health scare, but in some ways that's the key to the whole session. It isn't just that April is afraid to trust anyone. It's that her life has been so difficult -- and with the possibility of caring for Daniel, she knows it may only get more difficult -- that the cancer may be providing her with an escape hatch. And it's everything Paul can do to keep her from trying to bail on life. In their last session, he was able to do it by going beyond the call of duty and physically taking her to the doctor. Unwilling or emotionally unable to do that this week, Paul instead sees that hard-won victory slipping through his fingers, and I felt just as alarmed when she left the office as I did when she claimed to have spoken with her mother at the end of the third episode.

Oliver

"It's like rats abandoning a sinking ship." -Luke

As I've said before, Oliver doesn't have any real problems. I mean, he has external problems, not least of which is the bully(*) who drives him to run away from school and straight to Paul's office (the only place in the world where he feels safe). But all of his emotional issues are being caused by these external forces, and so I like that these last two episodes have spent more time on Paul getting to know the chief external forces -- first Bess, and now Luke.

(*) Another great moment of Paul failing to hide his emotions: check out the look of pure rage on his face when Oliver is telling him about the dog-doo locker prank. It's all in the set of his jaw, but it's there.

Where Bess -- who understandably, if not appropriately, seems determined to extend her Me Time vacation for a good long while -- seems largely oblivious to her behavior and how it affects Oliver, Luke at least is blessed with enough self-awareness to know how badly he's treating his son, if not the wisdom to figure out how to stop doing it.

The patients on "In Treatment" are all in some way supposed to reflect Paul's own problems. Oliver has stood in for Paul's children, whom he struggles to relate to half as well as someone like Oliver or, last year, Sophie. Luke, meanwhile turns out to be a stand-in for Paul himself: a bad dad who wishes he could be a better one, and the son of a distant and adulterous father who fears he's turned into his old man's exact double. When Paul tells him this doesn't have to be so -- "You don't have to become like him. You're not doomed to live your father's life. You have a choice." -- he nods at himself, as if he knows he needs to learn this lesson as badly as Luke.

This session is far from a cure-all, but the look that Luke and Paul exchange at the end suggests that it accomplished a lot more than last week's comparable Bess session. Luke may be an ass, but he'd rather not be, and if Paul can keep getting through to him, then maybe Oliver has a fighting chance.

Walter

"It's too late for me. We both know that." -Walter

If Walter is this year's Alex, then sooner or later he was going to attempt suicide. Is it a coincidence that he tried this after Paul canceled their last session, or has he let Paul become his only lifeline in the same way that April has?

Though the episode takes place in Walter's swank hospital room, it plays out like a traditional "In Treatment" episode, with the two men even moving over to the armchairs so they can sit opposite each other the way they do in therapy. And, as usual, Walter is combative as hell, emotionally slapping Paul across the face with the knowledge of Alex's death and the lawsuit (which makes Oliver this week's only patient to not know more than he should about Paul's personal life) and trying to bully his way out of having to admit that he wanted "a millionaire's death."

But he does admit it -- "I just wanted it to be over. That's all." -- claiming to be doing it for altruistic reasons, even as Paul points out how cruel it would be to his wife and daughter. And for a moment, Paul seems to be getting through to him, just as he's always almost there with April. But then Walter armors up again, and you can see he's resolved to end it, somehow, just as soon as Paul, and Natalie, and Connie, and the world, are looking the other way.

(I liked how Walter refers to Paul as "a young man" in the same week where April is discussing how old he is, and whether 50+ will always seem very old to her.)

Maybe the most interesting scene of the episode -- even though it doesn't feature the amazing John Mahoney -- is at the end, when Natalie tells Paul that Connie has been in rehab, and Paul realizes that Walter's carrying an even greater burden than he's let on. Because the patients can be, at best, unreliable narrators about their own lives, it's always interesting to meet other people who can cut through the half-truths and self-flattery and give Paul a clearer picture. I had always expected to get something like that in the first episode with Alex's father -- to find out that Alex had either exaggerated, or flat-out invented, half of the outlandish stories he told Paul -- but that never happened. Here, if Walter wouldn't tell Paul this huge detail, what else has he left out of the auto-biography?

Gina

"You already know that love's the only thing that has a chance against death." -Gina

His father's death -- and Gina's non-attendance at the funeral (which suggests she now views herself as Paul's therapist more than his friend) -- would likely already have Paul in a bad mood for this session. But then he makes things worse by mistaking the warmth Kate showed him in the aftermath of his father's death with a desire to get back together, humiliating himself by asking her to give him another shot when she's already moved on.

So he's irritated, and on edge, and still filled with self-loathing for refusing to see his dad sooner -- and for not realizing that he had this whole other life outside of being the bastard who walked out on Paul's mom and had an affair with a patient.

Gina says she doesn't want to hear about Paul's patients, which may be the right thing for her as his therapist, but which is kind of unfortunate for me as a viewer. Because if ever there was a week for Paul to talk about his patients -- to talk about how the obligations between a father and son are not unlike those between a doctor and his patient, how he had to temporarily leave his patients because of his father, and all the havoc that caused -- it's this one.

Gina tries to get him to see that it's possible to have mixed feelings about his dad, but he's too raw to see that at this point, and is almost eager to get out and have that uncomfortable meeting with Mr. Prince.

And speaking of which (and I always welcome a chance to watch Glynn Turman in this role), what should Paul do? Gina's been trying to tell him that he isn't responsible for Alex's death. Forget the legal and/or professional implications for a minute. How badly would this retard Paul's attempt to get past the guilt he feels about it? Or would he be able to write a confession he doesn't believe in, just to get this headache over and done with?

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In Treatment: Week four in review

As usual, I'm going to review all five of this week's "In Treatment" episodes together, giving a general overview of the week, followed by brief thoughts on each patient. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I get some pastries...

This is the midway point of season two (which is seven weeks compared to season one's nine), and so we see many barriers broken. Mia and Oliver both find themselves dining in Paul's kitchen, though only one of them is invited. Paul takes April to chemo (finally!). Walter shows up dressed casually, his career ruined. And the fifth episode is the first of the series to mostly break with the usual format, featuring three vignettes instead of one -- though all three are, in the series' usual style, two-character pieces. (Even Paul with his dad is a two-hander of sorts.)

And as various social and procedural barriers are broken, Paul and Gina start breaking through to their patients. Paul gets Mia to start thinking seriously about her relationship with her father. He gets April to put off her mother and finally place herself first in her own life. He starts talking to Bess as a person and not just Oliver's mother. And Gina finally gets Paul to go see his father, just this side of too late.

Amazing performances from everybody this week. Only three weeks to go. It seems to be going by awfully fast with this scheduling, doesn't it?

Mia

"That's pretty good. I thought I was just sleeping around." -Mia

Mia's been trying to push past Paul's own professional barriers throughout the season, but here it's not about entitlement, or about trying to justify the scenario she's built up in her head where Paul is the man responsible for her abortion. Instead, just like Alex hooking up with Laura last season, this is Mia trying to send a warning to Paul that she's in a real crisis and needs his full attention. And unlike a year ago -- perhaps because of a year ago -- Paul notices this time, and calls her on it.

And we get some more insight into Mia's self-destructiveness and how her relationship with her dad plays into that. He didn't molest her, apparently, but he held her emotionally closer than a father should, and it's messed her up.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Mia story this week is what Paul says to Gina in the fifth episode: that, under different circumstances, if Mia could deal with her issues, she's the kind of woman he'd be interested in. That tracks with his attraction to the similarly-difficult Laura, and with the rapport he shows with her in the moments when she's not being an enormous pain in the rear. Where Paul's great with kids (even a young adult like April), there's often a greater tension between him and his grown-up patients, but there are moments when he and Mia are remarkably at ease with each other, and not just because they go so far back together.

I don't expect, or even want, Paul to wind up dating her -- he makes that clear to Gina, and I don't think he or the writers are foolish enough to go down that road twice in such rapid succession -- but I'm wondering what the ethical rules are here. Is he forbidden from ever seeing her romantically? I would think so -- he has so much power over her as her therapist that there's just too much possibility for abuse, for him to subtly mold her into someone who'd be attracted to him -- but I don't know, and I know we have some people with serious therapy experience (from either side of the couch) in the audience who might want to weigh in on this. It seems like a Paul/Mia relationship, down the road, would be much healthier than Paul/Laura, but it still seems inappropriate.

April

"What if I come with you to the hospital?" -Paul
"Would you?" -April
"Yes." -Paul
"Now?" -April
"Yes. Right now." -Paul

Thank. God.

Again, on the subject of ethical boundaries, I spent so much of this episode -- really, so much of the last two or three -- wondering where exactly the line is for Paul in this situation. He even admits to Gina, "I know it was wrong" to take April there, and I can see the reasons why under ordinary circumstances -- if April can't bring herself to go on her own, then Paul's just a crutch creating another emotional problem for her -- but these are desperate times when ordinary standards can't, or shouldn't, apply. April was slowly killing herself, and isn't Paul obligated to keep his patients from doing that?

The rest of this episode, in which Paul realizes April is doing this in part to avoid being stuck as Daniel's caretaker, was also incredible, but those last two minutes... damn. That's the strength of this show, and these performers, writers and directors: four weeks in, less than two hours total of this story, and I felt enormous relief at seeing Paul take the steps he took, and seeing April follow him to the doctor.

Oliver

"The moment they saw Oliver, it's like their daughter disappeared." -Bess

It's interesting that so much of this episode featured Bess solo without Oliver -- just as several of the Jake/Amy episodes featured one but not the other -- because the more we see of this story, the more obvious it becomes that there isn't a damn thing wrong with Oliver. He's in a terrible circumstance, and he's shutting down because of it, but the patients Paul needs to fix are Bess and Luke. Improve the situation -- improve how Bess and Luke behave with each other, and with Oliver -- and maybe Oliver will be bullied and deal with the other angst of a kid that age, but overall, he'd be fine.

While the stakes here aren't as high as with April, in some ways Paul inviting Oliver into the kitchen for a sandwich was just as satisfying as Paul taking April to chemo. The kid needs to be rescued, and if Paul is maybe setting up a dangerous situation where Oliver invests too much in Paul as a surrogate father, at least for that moment, Oliver was happy. (And he was eating.)

Walter

"Let's face it: death is just the final acknowledgment. The show's over." -Walter

Well, at least Walter's aware he has problems now.

Of course, he's primarily focusing on his external problems -- loss of a job, the ongoing public humiliation, the strained relationship with his daughter -- and only vaguely aware of all the inner torment that was really causing the sleeplessness that originally brought him to Paul's office.

Like Mia, and April and even starving Oliver, Walter seems perilously close to giving up on everything. And he's old enough and stubborn enough and powerful enough -- or, rather, has lost enough power -- that I don't know how Paul is going to stop him.

Tammy/Gina/Paul's dad

"We both know what it's like not to be there at the end. It's something you don't get over -- ever." -Gina

As with the April episode, I'm tempted just to dwell on the last couple of minutes, with Paul talking to his dying father and saying "Dad" over and over again, his voice getting weaker each time. (I defy the people who mocked Gabriel Byrne's Golden Globe win to watch that scene and still say he doesn't deserve awards for this performance. I'm not saying Jon Hamm isn't brilliant; just that Byrne is, too.)

But the rest of the episode was great, too, from all the time cuts in the deposition to how quickly the bloom went off the rose in Paul and Tammy's relationship, to the way Gina slowly but surely got Paul to do the one thing he had to, while he still could, in the same way that Paul went to save April.

Now, just as Paul taking April to chemo once isn't going to cure her emotional problems (let alone her physical ones), Paul going to see his father isn't going to fix all his family issues. But it's a big moment for him. What comes next?

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In Treatment: Week three in review

Once again, I'm going to review all of this week's "In Treatment" episodes in one clip. A broad overview, followed by patient-by-patient thoughts, coming up just as soon as I take nap...

We're in week 3, which means (in the compressed therapeutic timeline of "In Treatment," anyway) the patients' defenses are starting to come down. No more pretending that they're not in therapy, or why they're there. They're starting to grow comfortable enough with Paul that April and Oliver both fall asleep in his office (really, it's the only place they can find peace), and April and Walter both feel okay with showing up at odd times. (Mia, on the other hand, winds up being annoyed that Paul's late for her.)

At the end of Mia's session, Paul talks about the phenomenon of "doorknob moments," where something dramatic happens just as the patient is on the way out of the office. As a TV drama, "In Treatment" has an awful lot of doorknob moments, and an especially high concentration this week, now that Paul's finally getting through (a little bit) to his patients.

Mia

"Aren't you glad I'm back?" -Mia

God, Hope Davis is such a delight playing an enormous pain in the butt, isn't she? While her situation is in many ways as sad as Oliver's or Walter's, you can always count on the Mia episodes to provide laughter -- whether it's the "Mia, 7:12 a.m." chyron at the end of the opening credits, or her declaing, "And I'm demanding, and I'm needy, and I'm angry, and I'm weepy. I'm the seven f--king dwarves!" -- before the inevitable tragedy of the April episodes.

Because she knew Paul way back when, and because she has access to personal details that an ordinary patient wouldn't -- including Laura's deposition -- Mia tries to act like she's not your average patient, and that she's entitled to know more about Paul's life. But where Paul let himself dance to Laura's tune last year -- and to Alex's when Alex started looking into Paul's past -- he very easily fends Mia off. Where a year ago I would have been nervous to hear Paul encouraging Mia to share her vision of how things might have gone between himself and Laura, here I was never concerned, because it was obvious that he was using that as an excuse to make Mia open up about her own fantasies and neuroses.

What's particularly amusing is that, other than the "small hips" comment, Mia could not be more wrong in her assumptions about Laura, who was every bit as complicated and difficult and frustrating as Mia herself is. But because Paul -- who was married, presumably happily, back then -- never showed an interest in her during their original therapy, she assumes he could never be drawn to someone so much like her.

This episode also has one of my favorite moments of the week, as Paul completely disarms Mia by playing the piano concert tape to show her just how well he remembered her. Again, all those scenes of the patients being difficult and Paul fumbling for answers are always worth it for when we get to see him have a breakthrough or make a grand gesture like that.

It's understandable why Mia might fear that Paul had forgotten her, as she's suffering from major abandonment issues on top of everything else. Note once again that she blames everyone in the world but her father for everything, in this case letting him slide for shipping her off to New Jersey while her mom had the twins.

April

"Can I use your phone again?" -April

This one's going to be the death of me. Allison Pill is so amazing, and the stakes are so high, that I almost want to skip to the last episode on this one and hope that Paul has finally dragged her to the world's greatest oncologist. The final scene -- when we're deliberately out of the room, so as not to know for sure if April called her mom, or if she just told Paul she did -- was as tense as you can get with a show that's nothing but talk, and the knot in my stomach only grew when she came out and told Paul she'd try her mom again another time.

I can understand, unfortunately, why April would be so reluctant to tell her mother about this. Bad luck in the genetic lottery meant that she spent her childhood always coming in second to her brother Daniel, and so concerned for her parents' emotional well-being that she couldn't even bring herself to tell them when she fell out a window, because she didn't want to ruin their one happy, carefree moment together. After that trip, and the way her mom and Daniel both backslid because of it, April decided she could never ask her mother to put her first. And so here she sits, with no one to call, no one she feels she can burden with this terrible news, other than a random construction worker, her ex-boyfriend (and his new girlfriend) and now Paul.

Damn it.

Oliver

"I don't feel comfortable anywhere." -Oliver

First, I want to commend all of you who spent so much time last week analyzing the deeper meaning of Oliver's turtle. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, but on this show, I feel like a turtle is surely not a turtle. Keep at it, even though Paul finally gets to send the turtle home with Oliver here.

As with Mia, and April, we see more and more of how clueless and neglectful Oliver's parents are. Bess thinks she's being a good mom by hovering over Oliver and trying to anticipate all his moods, but she's only making him more nervous, and more reluctant to share his feelings with her, or with anyone else. And she and Luke combined are so damned oblivious that it never once occurred to them to tell Oliver what happened to the adoptive brother he was going to get from Africa.

In the same way that Mia wishes she was Laura, the object of Paul's affection, Oliver desperately wants to be Paul's son -- not knowing, as we do, that Paul wouldn't be half as attentive to him if he were family and not a patient. And where April asks to be woken up after only a minute of napping -- and wakes up just as restless and disturbed as she was before -- Oliver's parents and Paul seem willing to let him keep sleeping in the waiting room for as long as possible (at least until the next patients arrive, I guess).

Walter

"And then she told me to go f--k myself... She broke my heart, Paul. She broke my heart." -Walter

Look at John Mahoney as he delivers that line. He is so angry, and so vulnerable, and so pained and so lost, as if nothing that's happened in Walter's long and difficult life -- not the loss of his brother, or the distance of his parents, or Vietnam, or the death of the Donaldson's son, or this current fiasco with the tainted baby food -- has mattered remotely as much to him as hearing those words come from his daughter's mouth.

Clearly, the love of his daughter -- the one person, other than his wife, who seems to have given Walter the affection he was denied for his childhood and much of his life -- is so important to him that he would leave the country, in the middle of the worst crisis of his career, just to check up on her based on a gut feeling. And in going, he only makes both situations worse, by opening himself up professionally to a move by this Jace he distrusts so much, and personally by becoming so controlling that he drove Natalie further away when he wanted to bring her closer.

His issues with abandonment and loss of control are so great that he's lost all sense of proportion, and of his own current problems. He tells Paul that the company can't get rid of him, quoting Louis XV's "Apres moi, le deluge" ("After me, the flood"), but he doesn't seem to realize that the flood has already started, and he's in danger of drowning in it.

Gina

"I just want to stop them all going through the windshield." -Paul

Mia and Gina provide nice bookends to the week, not only because they both have a longer history with Paul than the other three characters, but because what laughs there are to be found in "In Treatment" tend to come from the two of them. Paul's examination of his family history isn't what you'd call a laugh riot. But Dianne Wiest still gets these marvelous moments where Gina knows a lot more than Paul thinks she knows -- or wants her to know -- like when Gina refuses to get up from her chair to invite him in, just saying "Hello, Paul" in a perfect sing-song, then returning to that tone at the end of the session to warn him, "And next week, we'll talk about Tammy."

Fortunately, we don't have to wait until next week. That Paul should run into his first great love at his old therapist's office is as much of a dramatic contrivance as the rate at which his cases progress. But it gives us insight into what's making Paul tick this season, and into how he's changed since last year. A year ago, he waited forever to try anything with Laura, where here he dove right in. Admittedly, there was an ethical conflict present then and not now, but the man couldn't even wait seven days before breaking his promise to not try to date her until one or both of them were done being Gina's patient.

Because Gina is a good therapist and better friend, she lets the transgression slide this week once it becomes clear Paul has weightier problems on his mind from an especially rough week with his patients. And that conversation inevitably returns to talk of his parents, and the Christmas Eve memory -- which, like April's story of falling out the window, and many other unusually vivid stories we hear the patients tell, may be a screen memory, where what happened isn't exactly what the storyteller remembers as having happened.

Gina's good at this, and she's already been working with Paul for a while, and so she's able to get to a breakthrough moment more quickly than he has with his own patients, as Paul starts to realize that his father isn't the monster that he remembers -- that any man might be driven to infidelity by a bipolar wife, under the right (or wrong) circumstances.

Moments like Paul's Eureka, like Paul playing the piano tape for Mia, are why I keep coming back to this series, why I obsess on each episode of it when seemingly little happens, why last year I stuck with it even though I hated half the patients. Those breakthroughs -- or those simple instances of professional grace -- feel so much more powerful because we've gone through all the work to get there.

Now, obviously we have four weeks to go in this season, so Paul's not out of the woods yet. (And, in the event there's a third season, I imagine Warren Leight and company aren't going to "cure" him altogether.) But for a moment, everything in his fuzzy, messed-up life became crystal-clear, and I was glad to be on my own couch with him to see it happen.

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In Treatment: Week two in review

Once again, I'm reviewing all five episodes this week of "In Treatment" in one clip, with some overall thoughts on the week, followed by brief thoughts on each patient's episode. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I get a turtle...

Though the stories of each patient tend to move at different paces, "In Treatment" usually has thematic connections in each week. This week is about denial -- and about ticking clocks.

We're bookended by two people (first Mia, then Paul) being in denial about whether they're actually having a therapy session, and in between you have April refusing to deal with her cancer diagnosis, Oliver's parents being so lost in their own heads that they failed to have a candid conversation with their son about the separation, and Walter revealing that he's spent a lifetime with his psyche stuck in the sand.

Beyond that, there's an urgency to several of the cases. Mia notes that she basically needed to decide yesterday to get pregnant, so Paul doesn't have much time to get her head wrapped around what she wants her life to be. April's deadline is even more pressing -- it's literally life and death -- while Oliver's dad messes up the divorce timetable by jumping into a new relationship, and the scandal at Walter's company gets worse, jumping from the business section to the front page.

And Paul? Paul needs to let Gina help him, so he can help his patients -- fast.

Mia

"I meant you owe me a child, Paul. That's what you owe me." -Mia

Mia's a tough nut to crack, so after last week's non-therapy session at her office, here she comes to see Paul, allegedly not for therapy but so she can apologize for how she acted a week ago -- and, really, so she can demand apologies from Paul for encouraging her to have an abortion and sending her down the road to being 43, single, childless and practically infertile.

But did he actually encourage her, or is that just how Mia remembers it 20 years later? There are times when Gabriel Byrne makes Paul's expressions clear as day, and times when he's deliberately inscrutable. This episode featured more of the latter, particularly as Mia recounted her memory of their old therapy sessions together. It's entirely possible that Paul has forgotten how it all went down, but it's equally possible that he's just letting her vent because hearing her version of things gives him insight into the issues she's dealing with today. The end of the episode, where Paul takes out Mia's old file -- and, remember, he said last week he stopped taking notes 15 years ago, but he treated her before that -- skims it, and then removes the cassette tape of classical music that's presumably the "gift" she gave him all those years ago. If he doesn't remember it all, he remembers enough.

Mia, meanwhile, is not only in denial of the fact that she's having a therapy session, but of the role her father played in her decision to terminate the pregnancy. Her dad both figuratively and literally drove her to the abortion, but she makes him blameless and directs all of her anger at Paul. Her comment about how all girls share secrets with their daddies raised my eyebrows even more than it did Paul's, and it wouldn't be "In Treatment" if we weren't about to explore some parental issues.

As others have pointed out, Mia could very easily be a caricature of the bitter career woman, but the character is saved by the specificity of the writing and by the vulnerability Hope Davis gives her. I love the way she delivers the line about how her affair with Bennett was like a fairy tale -- "Princess f---s the frog" -- because it's funny but it's also sad, and Mia recognizes both those things at once.

April

"April, would you rather die than be weak?" -Paul

April is, if anything, even more hostile and sarcastic than Mia, and understandably so. If Mia doesn't beat her ticking clock, she still gets to live. Even if Paul helps April get over the problems that are keeping her from getting chemo, she could still suffer an early and very painful death.

Like Walter with his panic attack last week, we see April has her own unsettling physical issue -- the hand tremors -- that she treats as totally normal, and the more we hear from her, the more we realize she's dealing with so much that she has no room to add another problem like the tremors, let alone the cancer.

She and the show are also doing their damndest to keep Paul and the audience at arm's length. Because she's dying, it would be so easy for her story to overwhelm the other four (including Paul's), but she has her armor up and doesn't want to be a victim. She's abrasive and self-destructive and we found out that she cheated on the boyfriend (with his best friend) she's been ranting about for much of the last two episodes.

But you can see in Alison Pill's great performance how much of an effort this is for April, and Paul can see it, too. He knows she wants help, even if she can't admit it, and so he cleverly finds the weak spots in that armor. She's smart enough to anticipate Paul's questions before he asks them, but rather than act offended by her presumption, Paul plays it like it only makes his job easier that she can see things from his point of view.

And looking through other people's eyes is definitely not one of her problems. She understands her autistic brother better than she understands anyone else in the world, and you can see her starting to disconnect herself from the world in the same way that he does. And that's scary, and dangerous -- dangerous enough that, while Paul promises to not discuss her case outside this room, he starts taking notes for the first time in decades, hoping to prevent another Alex situation.

Oliver

"So you are getting a divorce, because of me?" -Oliver

While Oliver's predicament isn't quite as dire as April's, it's still pretty brutal. And because he doesn't have April's prickly defenses yet -- which, frankly, is one of the reasons he's suffering so much now -- he's an even more sympathetic character. Aaron Shaw is so natural as the poor kid that it really hurts to see his parents be oblivious twits around him, and I want Paul to yell at them even more than I want him to grab April by the wrist and physically escort her to chemo.

The pre-credits scene neatly illustrated the family's larger problem: they're each listening to their iPods, lost in their own worlds, oblivious to each other's wants and needs, and then Oliver is gobsmacked to see a perfectly happy-looking couple emerge from Paul's office. You can see him asking himself, "Is that what a normal family looks like?"

Oliver shows off the baby turtle he got for a class project, and his fears of what he might do to it -- forgetting to feed it, leaving it behind (which he, in fact, does) -- sound very much like how Luke is treating him. Luke wants Oliver to be a man, but he's not a man yet, and in this time more than anything else -- as he's suffering not only from his parents' fighting, but from being mercilessly picked on at school and having no one he feels he can tell about it -- he needs to be a boy, and to let his father take care of him.

And then, just as I was imagining that awful story about hiding behind the bush at the party and getting urinated on, Oliver went and proved that he's more perceptive than either of his parents realize. When Luke tells Bess about his new girlfriend, and Bess explodes at him, Oliver recognizes that the only good move in that situation -- for Luke, for himself, and even for his mom -- is to step up and offer to stay at Luke's apartment after refusing to go for the last week. The offer undercut Bess' attempt to attack Luke for not having Oliver's best interests at heart, and if it hurt his mom to hear Oliver siding with his dad for once, it still shut her up. And for this family, the only time they seem truly at peace is when none of them are talking (ala the opening scene); they may not be hearing what the others are feeling, but they're also not making the situation any worse.

Walter

"Don't read too much into that." -Walter

As Paul notes, that's a hell of a thing to say to your therapist, isn't it? But that's Walter's big problem: he doesn't read too much into anything, and so he's spent most of his long life completely oblivious to the importance of his panic attacks, or their connection to the other terrible tragedies he's suffered. He doesn't understand that the attacks are tied to his brother's death, or that a recent one might have been triggered by news of the death of Bob the security guard.

He has no flippin' clue. And, as I asked last week, might he not be better off at this point without Paul trying to give him one? Walter's made it into his 60s, and to a prominent (albeit currently embattled) position in the business sector while managing to ignore the root causes of his pain. Is making him confront his feelings about his brother's death and the rest really going to help him at this late date, or just cause more pain?

This was another great episode for Gabriel Byrne reactions, particularly the look on his face as Walter relates the chilling line his father gave him after his brother died: "This is yours now. I just told your mother, now I know why we had you." What the hell do you say in response to that? Particularly to a man who shrugs it off like it's nothing?

After Walter pays in cash -- like a drinker giving an insightful bartender a particularly big tip -- we see, as we do at the end of the April episode, just how much all of this weighs on Paul. He's good at his job -- and better than he was last year -- but sharing other people's secret pain is a burden, particularly when you understand that pain so much better than your patients.

Gina

"Maybe that's something you could work on in therapy." -Gina

Just like last week, we get to see Gina the brilliant puppet-master, carefully leading Paul down the path she knows he needs to walk, no matter how angrily he denies that. They've moved past whatever grudges they had last year. Now she's just his doctor, and she's not going to indulge -- or even really acknowledge -- his tantrums. She's just going to keep nudging him in the right direction until he stops griping and starts self-examining.

With April having ordered Paul not to discuss her with anyone else, the bulk of the session deals with Paul's own past -- both the cases from last season and the bits of his childhood we already know a little about. Laura is still a presence in the room, thanks to her being deposed by Mr. Prince's lawyers, and for the first time, Paul seems to recognize that Alex wasn't sleeping with her to one-up Paul, but as an unspoken (probably unconscious) cry for help.

Like Walter, Paul tells his own painful childhood story, of the Christmas Eve party where he and Tammy Kent made out, followed by Paul returning home to find his mother after her first suicide attempt. Though Paul, like his patients, doesn't want to talk about his parents, it's clear that his savior complex came about precisely because he couldn't eventually stop his mom from killing herself. So Alex's apparent suicide, and April's attempt to do the same, are especially painful to him.

What I found interesting the first time I watched this episode was the expression on Dianne Wiest's face as Paul tells the Christmas Eve story, followed by Gina's suggestion that Paul call Tammy. What exactly does she know, if anything? Did Tammy -- her memory perhaps jogged by seeing Paul last week -- give her own version of that story in the previous session?

A few other thoughts:

• Lots of references, some more overt than others, to Paul's family. During the Oliver session, the camera lingers on his face for a long time as Luke and Bess fight, and it's clear he's thinking back to all the similar fights he and Kate had while facing Gina under similar circumstances a year ago. Then we see, briefly, Paul's daughter Rosie (played, again, by Mae Whitman, aka Ann from "Arrested Development") -- who, like Oliver, doesn't want to accept the reality of her parents' separation -- and Michelle Forbes as Kate, who still feels incredibly bitter towards Paul. (And, in bringing up how he neglects his younger son, she reminds us again that Paul's really only good with kids when they're patients.)

• I loved the shot of Oliver sitting in Paul's chair, his feet dangling way above the floor. Didn't Sophie try sitting in his chair a time or three last season?

• Hagai Levi, creator of the original Israeli "Be'Tipul," directed both the April and Walter episodes this week.

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