The fourth season of In Treatment became available in Israel on Monday on Cellcom TV, on HOT HBO on Mondays and Tuesdays at 10 p.m., as well as HOT VOD and Next TV, and on YesVOD, and then on Yes Drama starting June 5, with episodes on Friday and Saturday at 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.
It’s worth noting that BeTipul, created by Hagai Levi, Ori Sivan and Nir Bergman in 2005, was the show that began the transformation of Israel into a country that had very little decent TV into a television powerhouse that supplies the world with quality programming.
BeTipul, which has been remade in dozens of countries around the world, accomplished this simply because it was a brilliant idea, one that was as intriguing to audiences as it was attractive to producers because it was cheap to create.
The original show was about a psychologist, and it simply presented sessions between him and his patients, one session per episode, five episodes a week, with another session each week devoted to him discussing his work and his life with his supervisor.
The original Israeli series starred Assi Dayan as the therapist, in one of his last great roles, with every inch of his weary face showing the weight of the burden the work and his own failures placed on him.
Gila Almagor, the grand dame of Israeli theater and film, was his supervisor, while such stars as Ayelet Zurer, played a patient who falls in love with the therapist and for whom he also develops inappropriate feelings, while Lior Ashkenazi portrayed a tough air force pilot tormented by the victims whose lives he took in bombing raids.
With this great cast, every episode was filled with intense drama, and audiences were in suspense to see what would happen with each character the next week.
BeTipul ran for two seasons, in 2005 and 2008, and its HBO remake, In Treatment, began running in 2008, with Gabriel Byrne as the therapist and a cast that included Dianne Wiest as his supervisor, Melissa George as the patient for whom he develops feelings, and Blair Underwood as the guilt-ridden pilot. The first season of the show matched the plot of the Israeli series but began to diverge in the later seasons, the last of which ran in 2010.
THE NEW season, which is being described as a reboot rather than a continuation, is set in Los Angeles and during the pandemic, and runs for 24 episodes, 16 of which were released to the press.
It stars Uzo Aduba as Dr. Brooke Taylor. Aduba became a star playing Suzanne, aka Crazy Eyes, on Orange is the New Black. In a great ensemble cast, she was the standout and took her character from someone fearful and crazy to the most sympathetic figure of all, the one we worried about the most. If you were a fan of OITNB, it will take a few moments, maybe a few episodes, to be able to forget her previous role and to accept her as a healer, rather than someone desperately in need of help. But Aduba is so good that after a little while, Suzanne faded and Brooke took her place.
At first, Brooke, a single 42-year-old living and working in a beautifully furnished house and dressed in designer clothes and jewelry, seems to have it all together. She is a good therapist who is not afraid to open up to her patients about her own life when she feels this can help them.
But gradually, as her full story is revealed, Brooke becomes a much more vulnerable figure, and it becomes clear that the gulf between her and Suzanne is not as wide as it seems at first. Once again, Aduba, who is in nearly every moment of the series, is incredibly appealing and makes her somewhat soapy story compelling.
Aduba is the good news. The bad news is that her three patients never quite come to life as characters. They seem more like a pastiche of fashionable ideas than real people.
Anthony Ramos of Hamilton plays Eladio, a literary, alienated young Latino man who is a caregiver to the disabled son of a wealthy family, with whom he is quarantining during the pandemic.
His character breaks a lot of stereotypes about poor Latinos, but in spite of his charm, Eladio never seems like a real person.
John Benjamin Hickey, an accomplished Broadway and screen actor who stars in Eytan Fox’s upcoming film, Sublet, plays Colin, a high-tech entrepreneur who became a white-collar criminal and has just been released from prison.
Hickey is good, as he always is, but his character is so thoroughly saddled with every bad white-guy trope – he’s entitled, dishonest, dismissive, confrontational and self-pitying – that it’s hard to care much about his therapy.
Quintessa Swindell is Laila, a poor little rich girl whose tales of her sex addiction don’t quite make sense. She seems to be there to talk about Black Lives Matter issues that are included for political, not dramatic, reasons.
Liza Colon-Zayes plays Brooke’s best friend, and Joel Kinnaman is her boyfriend.
Eventually, buoyed by Brooke’s story and Adubo’s performance, the series is watchable, and I will enjoy seeing how it all plays out. But at times, watching it feels as if you are “doing the work,” as the therapist often tells her patients they should.