The Doctor Is Back In, and He's Doing Fine; In Treatment Has Improved Leaps and Bounds in Season 2

IN TREATMENT
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

I was very sniffy about the first season of In Treatment. I said that this show about a psychologist and his patients was just another medical soap, more highfalutin than most, but still focusing on the practitioner rather than on those practised upon. I have to eat crow. The second season strikes me as being a quantum leap on its predecessor, but this isn't because it's abandoned the things that, first time around, I felt were flaws. It's kept them, pushed them even further into the centre and proved them to be assets.

I started my first course of In Treatment assuming that Paul, the therapist so beautifully and tactfully played by Gabriel Byrne, would function as sounding board rather than protagonist. I was disconcerted when one of his female patients fell in love with him (cliche No. 1), when she bumped into a male patient just outside Paul's consulting room (cliche No. 2) and when the two patients started a relationship (need I go on?).

Paul himself was then dragged into the centre of the action, which was further complicated when his wife left him. Now it's true that even from the start Paul was a more interesting presence than most of the people he treated. But it still seemed like cheating: a betrayal of the quasi-realistic, quasi-clinical format the show had apparently laid down for itself.

In this new season, now in its second week, Paul's problems seem even more acute, and everything else reflects back on them. No longer does everything happen in a consulting room, either Paul's or that of his supervisor Gina (Dianne Wiest), the shrink's shrink. Notice was served of that in the first episode, which took place in a lawyer's office.

Paul, now divorced, has moved from Maryland to Brooklyn, pursued by a multi-million dollar lawsuit. One of his former patients is dead, maybe a suicide; Paul is being sued for negligence. Intellectually he knows this to be ridiculous; emotionally he can't be sure, for reasons not confined to the deceased having been the male half of Season 1's affair.

A member of the legal firm that Paul consults turns out to be Mia (Hope Davis), another former patient: one whom, years ago, he encouraged to have an abortion, a decision that, with her biological clock ticking, she now regrets. That first episode gave us a chain of reversals: the therapist in the hot seat, the tables re-turned as it turns out that the New York malpractice specialist, with her big salary and high-achieving view over Manhattan, still needs his help.

And she'll be getting it, once a week. As before, we spend four evenings a week watching Paul in session with patients, and the fifth bringing his own problems, which include his patients', to Gina whom - in an echo of the situation with Mia - he first consults as a friend and then as a patient. Davis, hyper-active, and Wiest, hyper-calm, are both terrific, but so are all the other principals. Maybe New York just breeds classier neurotics, but Paul's current patients are a far more compelling - and disturbing - collection than his previous bunch.

There's April, an aggressively bright student who's been diagnosed with cancer and is refusing treatment because to acknowledge the need for it would be to give up control. Alison Pill is ferociously good in the role. ("I bet," she says with all the sarcastic confidence of a 23-year-old, "you're one of those people who still has a land line." Paul pleads guilty.) Also terrified of acknowledging weakness is Walter, a CEO whose company is under threat, whose daughter is doing dangerous volunteer-work in Rwanda and who is suffering attacks - which he's had, he says, since childhood as if that made them less serious. John Mahoney does a fine job of showing the man's inner struggle between arrogance and need; he acts not just with his eyes but with the bags under them. I wonder: Is the world divided between those people who, in therapy and out, compulsively underplay their problems, and those who do the reverse?

Finally and most wrenchingly, there is Oliver, the 11-year-old son of a breaking marriage; his parents, who bring him to the sessions and compete for his love, are graphic illustrations of what has gone wrong. Aaron Shaw is amazing as this boy who, when Paul asks him about his school's history lessons, replies, "We don't have history, we have humanities. And right now we're reading this lame book called Lord of the Flies." Why is it lame, Paul asks. Because, says Oliver, "you've no need to crash on an island for kids to be mean." Oliver knows; he's overweight and his schoolmates, taking their cue from the lame book, have taken to calling him Piggy.

All these cases hit Paul where he lives - or where he no longer lives. They all, in some way, involve children. His own daughter tells him, "there'll be no more hugs - not until you come home," which is plainly impossible.

In a lovely touch we see, behind them on a shelf, a turtle left behind after his last consultation with Oliver, who's supposed to be looking after him as a school project. ("If he dies, I fail.") In a sense, the connections between the stories are artificial, but it's the kind of artifice that makes for dramatic truth. The show is based, episode for episode, on an Israeli series, but the American writers, who include such successful playwrights as Warren Leight and Marsha Norman, have acclimatized it. Writing and direction are sober, and sometimes very moving. Byrne - prickly when his own problems are in question, infinitely patient with his patients - is superb. However racking his doubts, you know that Paul is in the right profession. This is the best drama series since Mad Men, the best from HBO since The Wire.