In Treatment is an HBO adaptation of the Israeli series Bi'tipul about a troubled therapist and a bunch of his patients, each of whom reflect some part of his own problems with his life. Gabriel Byrne is the therapist, the seriously sexy Michelle Forbes is his cheating and frustrated wife, and there's Blair Underwood, Mia Wasikowska, Dianne Weist and Josh Charles supporting. This is a serious cast. The production and directing credits are pretty serious as well. The script structure is tight. It's pretty impressive.
And I decided at week eight of series one that's enough. I gave up fairly quickly on the Josh Charles / Embeth Davidtz couple squabbling about whether she should have an abortion, because it was obvious they shouldn't even be under the same roof let alone be parents. Dysfunction isn't drama. After about five episodes I passed on Melissa George's thirty-something sexy but unbalanced anaesthetist who has had, when the series opens, a one-year crush on her therapist. Yeah, I don't think so. He looks old, tired and dead in spirit. I don't care how unbalanced she is, no woman would keep going for a year with someone with so little joy in life. This left Blair Underwood's US Navy pilot and Mia Wasikowska's terminally messed-up teenage gymnast Olympic hopeful with an absent super-model photographer father and caring but wet mother who doesn't want her to train any more.
Right. Let's just say "terminally messed-up teenage gymnast Olympic hopeful with an absent super-model photographer father and caring but wet mother who doesn't want to train any more" again. Notice anything unlikely about it? Read the biographies of top athletes, or talk to the parents of high-performing athletic teenagers, and you will find out that in order for a teenager to get to be even a regional contender, let alone an Olympic hopeful, the parents have to turn their lives over to providing logistical, financial, moral and domestic support for their child. The idea that a teenage girl could make it to being a US Olympic hopeful with an absent father and a mother who doesn't want her to do it is terminally, totally unrealistic. And it's utterly unnecessary. Mia Wasikowska's performance is so compelling we would be fascinated if she was just on the school team.
So now to Blair Underwood's US Navy pilot who performed his mission as instructed, but because he was given some wrong co-ordinates or because some insurgents had moved a bunch of kids into their base, a bunch of children got killed. He is known as the "Madrassa Murderer". At first he seems to have no qualms about this, but in the end, it and what gets stirred up by the process causes him to commit suicide by mis-flying on a Top-Gun style training exercise. Of course he had to be in moral agonies about bombing a bunch of school kids. Let's have him wonder if he's gay through some pretty crass dream symbolism, and then have him talk about how he just loves hanging out with his two gay friends. Of course that, and the harsh and unloving upbringing from his father caused him such emotional turmoil that he couldn't take it any longer. Spot the politically correct liberal sensibilities.
Military pilots are chosen because they have the temperament to drop bombs, knowing that some innocent people might be also killed, and then sleep well at night and especially because they have got the temperament not to crash their planes out of guilt. How did the Allies and the Germans conduct all those bombings of civilians in WW2? If the pilots were in agony about killing civilians, the bombing campaigns would not have lasted more than a week. And what on earth he is doing seeing a civilian shrink when the Navy psychologists would be all over him is anyone's guess. I'm guessing that in real life, the civilian shrink would have to be security-cleared, vetted by the Navy shrinks and have gone through some military orientation. (Now that would be a story.)
Those two unrealistic stories are there for reasons. First, so that we will be more interested in two of the characters than if they were just ordinary Joes. Second, to suggest that successful, high achieving people can be screw-ups as well. Now the latter is true, just not about teenage gymnasts or Top Gun combat pilots. The writers guessed, and rightly, that we might not be too interested in the problems of a highly-paid derivatives trader, conceptual artist or soccer player. Third, the screw-ups can't be too similar to the audience, or the audience will feel the pain, make excuses and change channel. (Bickering married couples are there for contrast: isn't it terrible how some marriages just don't work, whereas we get along really well, don't we darling?) Fourth, and this is crucial, at least in drama, therapeutic screw-ups must be caused by family: schools, employers and local and national government must never be to blame for anything. It seems we can get help dealing with how Daddy and Mummy messed us up when we were seven, but not with how the incompetent egoists who ran the company messed us up when we were thirty-seven by dumping everyone out on the street with an IOU for their severance package. In the carefully Bowdlerised world of mass media drama, Capital and State are invisible, leaving only the Family visible to take the blame. It means the writers are restricted to family dysfunction, and like I said, I don't think dysfunction is drama. I may be in a minority on that one.
Its compression of the lengthy process of classical (as opposed to CBT or short-treatment) therapy into nine thirty minute episodes meant that what we got was a concentrated dose of dysfunctional conflict on a par with a bad episode of Eastenders. What was sucking me in was the sick feelings not the interest of the process. You might like that ride, but it's not good for me.
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