GLArm I have seen the first 14 episodes and am wondering about the rave reviews. Yes, the series is well-acted with interesting story lines, but...... I don't like one of these characters except perhaps Gina, Paul's therapist. I feel sorry for the children - Paul's son Ari and his teen-aged client. But I think Paul, the main character, is insufferable, and his wife and adult clients are kind of disgusting, too.So at this point, I'm not sure if I'll continue watching the series or not. Interesting, yes, but compelling? No.

neslihanduda We have become increasingly short sighted and on the surface so some of the critics of this show complain. The show asks you to go deep and feel deep. We are not used to that. No offense to those series which have pornographic depiction of a variety of behavior displaying human weakness in such violent ways. But those are consumed easily somehow.We see a certain person from a certain background and we are sure that person has these general characteristics, we place even our pets into boxes where the identification is quick and efficient.We pass judgments everyday. We forget what is one thing that is absolutely amazing about being a human the depth and complexity of human emotions. I as an academician am cornered to give very high grades to my students who simply are not prepared academically and they are conditioned not to think deep. I also have to bow to my colleagues who let this happen along with a great display of arrogance rather than humility.When I spend time to understand my college students within the boundaries of professionalism I am called a naive person. In my daily life, I am asked to classify everything and everyone on the surface and as such I am classified in that regard as well. This series is a true challenge to our culture where we have lost touch with reality. It is beautifully acted without any formulas and boundaries on creativity. Thank you in treatment! Please turn off your gadgets and think after all such is the one superior gift that is bestowed on human kind (this is as per our current knowledge since we rarely spend time on researching complex mammals such as dogs)In the end it is up to you to leave behind a legacy....

sagei Read about how it was merely doctor patient conversations and stifled a yawn. About 2 minutes into the first episode and was hopelessly hooked.Doubt the portrayal is entirely realistic but don't care. It is gripping and moving. Immersive and addictive. No matter how many episodes passed, still couldn't wait to see what happened next.Have always liked Gabriel Byrne and he brings to life this flawed man trying to display an air of imperviousness. Deeply affected by his patients yet struggling to keep his distance at all times. Inevitably his reserve seeps into his personal life, alienating his family. As an actor he has to depict a wide range of emotions, all the time bound by the chair he sits in and the patient/character he speaks too. Truly a sight to behold. He is helped in no small part by the supporting cast who more than hold their own.In the age of transformers and avatar this is a master class in storytelling and drama. If you are debating seeing this, don't.Wish them well.Thank you.

erieroad In Treatment has been a gutsy move by HBO. In the world of television production, where the need to present program content in a hurry, and the rule of thumb that a hurried pace is a substitute for the development of characters, the medium is plagued with mediocrity as much as ever. Of course, many viewers prefer their telly fix with this subtext and the rule of hurry. Things have to be happening all the time, and expeditiously. But this show resists these conventions brazenly: with exceptions in later episodes, each half-hour session is staged in the therapist's office, where each Monday Laura (Melissa George), for example, sits on a couch facing Dr. Weston and the two talk about her problems. This intimacy grows on the viewer and becomes very absorbing - maybe too absorbing to some. A viewer is frequently confronted with profound hardships and misery below the surface that he might not want to bother with – and more,that he might find too close to home to watch. And although there is plenty of intensity and fireworks, the pace is minimalist, using Bergmanesque silence and implication in ways that might prompt some viewers to reach for their remotes. When these features of the program are combined with its dense time slotting, it runs the risk of being too much to ask of even the culturally high-ranked HBO viewer. One has to wonder if a second season might want to spread out the schedule, or somehow do one-hour shows.HBO needs to bring it back in any case, because this is exceptional television. Through the intimacy of the single scene, clear channel dialog between the very able Byrne and his well-played patients, In Treatment moves, provokes, challenges, arouses – and entertains. The writing has its lapses, but they are few.As his therapist (and teacher of years back), Wiest excels and her deeply ambivalent, often riveting exchanges with Byrne at their Friday evening sessions are finely wrought set pieces. Their time together is a well-designed vehicle for Byrne to let us know his story, the one he can't reveal during the rest of the week.The ensemble of patients and his family – perhaps because of the commanding presence of Byrne to spur them – does well, including the sixteen year old Sophie and Byrne's wife, played by Michelle Forbes. Dr. and Mrs. Weston are unhappy – miserable is more accurate – and their row halfway through the show over her infidelity is a match for any excruciating confrontation in a work of an O'Neill or a Williams.But by far the best of In Treatment is in Laura's sessions, and Melissa George informs her role with an energy and inventiveness that is both startling and marvelously disturbing. In a sense, the epicenter of the show is Laura, even when she's absent from an episode. In her raging passion for Paul, loosed in quanta among quieter but suspenseful moments of gazes and pleasantries, George's character takes confessions of impossible, painful love and turns them into potent star bursts. These are not exploding novas light years away, but launched across the table in the therapist's office, and rather than fading they refuse to cool, threatening to melt the covenant of therapist-patient. These days television rarely has the privilege of portraying the kind of tension one witnesses between Byrne and George. His efforts to impose his distance as therapist from her (and his) tormented erotic impulses are matched by her doggedness, however tainted it is by the maladjustment that brought her to him in the first place. In a sense Laura makes her therapist captive, deftly blurring the hallowed ethical line separating them. Somewhere along the line, beyond her casting in unremarkable pictures like Amityville Horror and other television work like Alias, Melissa George dived into the big waves of HBO. Beauty counts for much on television and in the movies, but at some point one has to turn action into character, and George has figured it out. And then some. With more parts like Laura in In Treatment, George just might be the reincarnation of Gene Tierney.