Patients, Patients.('In Treatment')(Television program review)

To say that the new HBO drama "In Treatment" is boring doesn't really get at what's wrong with the show; the problem, to a great extent, is that the show isn't boring enough. It's a half-hour drama centered on the therapy sessions of a psychotherapist named Paul (Gabriel Byrne)--sessions with five of his patients, and his own sessions with a former supervisor, Gina (Dianne Wiest). I learned many years ago, when learning such things cost only fifty dollars for forty-five minutes, that boredom isn't the same thing as stasis. Being bored doesn't mean that "there's nothing to do," as children imprecisely complain to their parents on a rainy day, dragging their feet on the rug and kicking the sofa. It means that something big--whether it's rain, other people, or our own hot-to-the-touch fears--is keeping us from doing what we want to do, from playing outside, from expressing ourselves, from moving forward.

It's hard to sit in a room and talk to another person in the way that therapy calls upon you to do. The inevitable silences, the halting admissions, the difficulty of finding the right words, the struggles with that enraging, adored person facing you, the secret pleasures of the embarrassing focus on you--just you, and nobody else but you--may look dull from the outside, but to the people involved it's a highly charged, tense, and active situation. "In Treatment," while offering viewers a seemingly intimate look at this process, doesn't capture the emotional mise en scene: the characters on the show have all too easy a time expressing themselves, and the element of suspense is mostly absent. (What's missing from "In Treatment" might not have been as noticeable if the show weren't premiering so soon after "Tell Me You Love Me," an HBO series about a couples therapist that aired last fall, whose atmosphere of awkwardness and shame came through the TV screen and right up into your face. When the characters in that show spun their wheels and went nowhere, you could smell the burning rubber. And, of course, viewers--I say this at the risk of seeming to beat HBO with its own "Sopranos" stick--still have vivid memories of Tony Soprano's sessions with Dr. Melfi, which set the bar very high for anyone who wants to dramatize a therapeutic relationship and raise questions about what therapy is for, and about whether it does any damn good, anyway.)

"In Treatment" is adapted from a popular Israeli series, and, in addition to being the first Israeli program to be remade for American television, it can lay claim to a number of other firsts. As it did in Israel, it will run here five nights a week--every weeknight--for nine weeks, with each night devoted to one patient, or, in one case, to a couple. This is HBO's first half-hour drama, and to fill the hour it will, starting in the show's second week, run the previous week's episode before the current one. (New episodes air at 9:30 P.M., Monday through Friday, and there will be many chances to catch repeats if you happen to miss one.) The show has a team of five writers, and, after the first week, each is in charge of his or her own night--in charge of his or her own patient, as it were. This approach is not a bad one, and although it may sound gimmicky, it isn't. Gimmickiness isn't "In Treatment" 's problem. It's that the writing itself rings false to an almost bizarre degree, with the result that the world created in the show simply isn't credible. It's not that there's no there there; there's no here there. "In Treatment" seems to be happening in a bubble somewhere, not in the United States, or anywhere else in particular. The show feels translated from another language without having been tailored for a new audience, though that actually isn't the case; some episodes closely follow the Israeli version, but a number are new. (The first week's episodes were all written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, who is also one of the executive producers, along with Stephen Levinson, Mark Wahlberg, and Hagai Levi, the creator of the original Israeli series.)

Paul works from home, in an unnamed, mostly unseen suburb, in an office that's the size of the New York Public Library; if you stick your head out the window a couple of minutes after the ...