on the couch and in the saddle; Joan Juliet Buck plunges into the secrets of an analyst's heart and gallops through the Old West.(Televsion)(HBO's 'In Treatment' and 'Comanche Moon')(Television program review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Television used to set up simple problems that could be solved in a half-hour show. HBO discovered some ten years ago that complex problems could be drawn out into stories of a length that hadn't existed since Dickens started publishing his novels as serials in 1836. Their first was Oz, set in a prison, then Sex and the City and The Sopranos, all of them about insoluble problems: Is there humanity in prison? Can a career girl find the right man? Can a lout turn soulful? By refusing to give easy answers, HBO brought the American TV viewer into adulthood.

Next month, HBO goes deeper into adulthood, with a series of intense half-hour encounters that draw you in so far that each episode burns. In Treatment is a serial about a psychotherapist that redeems the profession from the dead zone of movie and TV monologues. Perhaps the worst offender in that genre is HBO's other new show, Tell Me You Love Me, in which Jane Alexander counsels whining couples who then go home to have supposedly groundbreaking, but irredeemably tedious sex. When they are not having boring sex, they are boring each other in cars and at dinner parties.

In Treatment swats away all the cliches, dispenses with the verb sharing, and pits Dr. Paul Weston against intelligent, attractive, manipulative patients who defend their blind spots with cunning, sex, and style. There are few monologues and not one instant of tedium. In Treatment will be aired on successive weeknights starting January 28 (Monday through Friday at 9:30 p.m.), to mirror Paul Weston's experience through a week of patients: Monday is Laura, Tuesday is Alex, Wednesday is Sophie, Thursday is Jake and Amy, and by Friday at 7:00 p.m., he's back seeing his old supervisor, Gina. The drama builds on the lies people tell themselves and the lies they tell others, and the interweaving lies grow more complex and painful and juicy with every session.

Gabriel Byrne, just this side of rumpled and with a defiant Irish accent, plays the doctor, who only wants to give his patients a safe place. Most of the action is inside his office in his house, as if its walls and rust-colored sofa were the center of the earth. The sessions are electric from the start. On Monday, Laura, a beautiful 30-year-old doctor (the Australian Melissa George), confesses that she is so ambivalent about her boyfriend that she's almost had sex with a stranger. Then she tells Paul that it's him she loves. Tuesday's Alex (Blair Underwood) is a navy flier who killed sixteen children when he bombed a madrassa in Iraq, came home, and had a heart attack. Sophisticated, precise, and controlling, he's bent on returning to Iraq and seems a little mad. Wednesday's Sophie (another gifted Australian, Mia Wasikowska) is a sixteen-year-old prodigy gymnast with casts on both arms after an accident. Is she the victim or the cause? Amy (Embeth Davidtz) is a spiky executive with a British accent, married to passive, jealous Jake (Josh Charles); on the first Thursday she's pregnant, and ambivalent. When Paul returns to Gina, the analyst and mentor he stopped seeing ten years before, we find a maternal Dianne Wiest and prepare for the sort of comfortable one-on-one we've seen in a million films. Instead of reassuring him, she raises his discomfort level to acute. Paul's ethics won't allow him to respond to Laura, but by the second week, his wife, Kate (Michelle Forbes), drops a bomb on him, and Alex, ...