‘THERAPY” is one of those concepts that ordinarily generates in me much the same level of excitement as “IRS inquiry” or “holiday traffic,” yet when I sat down to watch “In Treatment,” I didn’t get up. For eight hours.
The second season of the half-hour drama from HBO — which is airing two episodes each Sunday and three more each Monday, all five of them featuring Gabriel Byrne’s psychoanalyst squaring off against a different character (including his own therapist) — is the best ad for shrinkology since “Ordinary People.”
With his wise eyes, his solemn brow and his few exquisitely chosen words, Paul (Byrne) is like a combination Solomon-Lincoln-Sherlock Holmes. Only with more authority.
Each week, Paul solves what amounts to a personality mystery. I’ve grown attached to what I call the “14-Minute Aha!” right around that mark Paul (or his shrink, again played by Dianne Wiest) pieces together seemingly unrelated information from the patient’s chatter and amazes the audience with a stupendous insight that’s both obvious and surprising at the same time.
Each episode feels like trying to solve a verbal puzzle before the champion can, but I lost every time: “The way that guy used the word ‘disappear’ in three different stories tells us everything! Why didn’t I notice?”
Draped over the whole season is a canopy of suspense fashioned from some of last year’s leftover story threads. A military pilot who Paul treated died in a possible suicide, a case that leads to a malpractice suit that could bankrupt the therapist this year.
The episodes are again organized as parallel story lines, each of them following a different patient.
Every Sunday at 9, for instance, we get that week’s session with a brittle lawyer (Hope Davis, an actress as breakable as a potato chip) who is having an affair with her married boss but, at 43, worries that she’ll be single and childless forever.
The second Sunday episode focuses on April (Alison Pill), an architecture student who can’t bring herself to tell her family she has cancer.
Mondays bring first Oliver (Aaron Shaw), a kid trying to cope with his parents’ impending divorce, then Walter (John Mahoney), a harried CEO who has been having panic attacks since he was 6.
Paul never takes notes — it’s a simple way for the series to reinforce his cool omniscience — but, soothing and attentive and rational as he is with his clients, he nevertheless vents and bitches and contradicts himself as much as any of them when it’s his turn to unload in the final Monday episode.
Though relying heavily on a formula, the writing of “In Treatment” could not be tighter or purer.
Having the half-hour time limit cocked and pointed at its head gives the show a focus few others can match. Each episode is like a two-character play pared down into the one critical scene.
“In Treatment” New season premiere Sunday and Monday nights at 9