HBO's In Treatment revival is beautifully appealing and inevitably a touch disappointing

Vulture

"In Treatment always seemed to have the same appeal as a good psychological mystery story, the gradual collection of clues, the slow reveal of someone’s inner life and the things that drive them, the red herrings, the close ties between the detective and the criminal," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "In a mystery, the detective pursues the criminal while the reader chases after the author, trying to see beyond everything that’s on the page to get at what’s being hidden underneath. In Treatment is like that, too. The therapist peels apart the patients; the viewers peel apart all the set dressing and performance that shows but also conceals who this person is. Nothing says a fun TV time like a cat-and-mouse game of inner-life analysis! For all of those reasons — the intricacy of that braided structure, the way analysis is framed as pursuit, the intensity of it all — the fourth season revival of In Treatment is beautifully appealing and inevitably a touch disappointing. Aduba is excellent as Brooke, a woman who is careful about the external appearance of everything: her home, her clothing, her meticulous makeup, her thoughtful active listening face. Brooke is also struggling with a whole world of her own hidden chaos, and Aduba plays that just as well, especially in the moments when Brooke cracks and lets the inside slip out, or when she has to gather herself and put the facade back on...There’s some meta-narrative happening there, too. The fourth season of In Treatment has been recast with a Black woman in the lead role, and gives her a chance to talk about stuff like cancel culture and wokeness and police violence. It’s often done well, but it’s also hard to overlook the self-awareness of it. The show’s structure says 'chase me,' but it’d be a better story if the themes played harder to get. The Big, Important Themes also get a little heavy-handed in the way this season weaves Brooke’s personal story together with the intertwining plait of her patients."

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• In Treatment is worth watching just for Uzo Aduba, "one of TV’s great discoveries of the last decade": "Aduba was just a guest star in the first season of (Orange Is the New Black), playing a relatively minor character on a show with an enormous cast," says Alan Sepinwall. "But her physicality and magnetism cut through instantly, as did her mastery of the show’s sometimes messy balance of comedy and drama. (Due to a quirk in the eligibility rules for Orange over the years, she and Ed Asner as Lou Grant are the only actors to win both comedy and drama Emmys for playing the same character.) And the loose-limbed expansiveness with which she played Suzanne (a.k.a. 'Crazy Eyes') was nothing like the fiery way she embodied trailblazing presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm in Mrs. America, which in turn bears almost no resemblance to how tightly controlled she is as Brooke, even when Brooke herself is wildly out of control. Like (Gabriel) Byrne, Aduba knows how to make Brooke’s silent reactions as noteworthy as her dialogue and speeches, and the gradual peeling of her onion proves an even worthier endeavor than the work Brooke does with Eladio and the others."
• There’s something fundamentally satisfying about In Treatment: The show "does not hit the heights of insight into human nature for which it aims; it does not justify airing four episodes a week," says Daniel D'Addario. "But it makes the case for its own existence thanks in substantial part to the performance of Aduba, who is proving to be one of the essential actors of the 21st century. For the first time in a TV lead role after Emmy wins for Orange Is the New Black and Mrs. America, Aduba makes In Treatment a success by force of will."
• In Treatment's writing doesn't feel authentic: "Aduba’s Lawrence has a similar 'writer’s voice' issue in her sessions that end each week with a friend named Rita (Liza Colón-Zayas)," says Brian Tallerico. "Here’s where viewers learn about how her father’s death has led her to figure out what happened to her child, as well as that she’s a recovering alcoholic who may have been enabled to return to her demons by an old boyfriend named Adam (Joel Kinnaman). Aduba really fights it, but the dialogue in the fourth session feels melodramatic more often than it does genuine, and that’s a shame given how often this show felt true and pure in its original incarnation. (And it’s through no fault of Colón-Zayas either, who does her best to make the overly scripted material sound real.) The writing and directing staffs have shifted, and they’re no longer working from original scripts from the Israeli version. One can feel both of these things in the texture and veracity of the show."
• Not everything in Season 4 clicks as there is too much focus on Aduba's character: "Acting isn’t one of the nagging issues tripping up Season 4, but Dr. Taylor is; as revealed in her weekly chats with Rita (Liza Colón-Zayas), a long-time confidante, Brooke is a mess," says Ben Travers. "Spoiler embargoes prevent me from getting into too many details, but Dr. Taylor isn’t an untrustworthy narrator — we know what she’s doing when no one’s around to watch her — but she is an untrustworthy therapist, which creates unnecessary complications in how we interpret her professional advice. She also takes on a disproportionate amount of the narrative focus. None of the 16 episodes screened for critics are wholly devoted to the patient, which can make it seem like the patients’ problems are just interruptions to Brooke’s story, which is overloaded with drama. It’s not just that Brooke is either unable or unwilling to set her personal life aside for her patients (again, it’s hard to tell how we should read some of her choices), it’s that scripts are unbalanced. Conversations often veer away from the person and into what the person represents. Each of Brooke’s clients in Season 4 come to embody an issue or group — Black American teens or privileged white men or essential workers who aren’t treated that way — more than they stand out as unique individuals in need of help. Sessions can feel like Brooke isn’t just trying to work out a problem for the patient; she’s trying to fix problems for the world. Going that big and broad can feel — you guessed it — exhausting."
• In Treatment doesn't feel as real as Couples Therapy: "Brooke is not an easy role to pull off, but Aduba was definitely the right choice to play her," says Dave Nemetz. "Her work as Suzanne on Orange Is the New Black is one of the best TV performances of the past decade; she’s a patient, openhearted actor and slips easily into therapist mode here. And when it’s Brooke’s turn to face her own demons, Aduba reveals a fire and a fresh complexity tucked inside the good doctor’s personality. Really, this show is an actor’s dream, with long speeches and lots of time to explore every last nuance of a character’s persona. The half-hour format works well, too: It concentrates the drama and doesn’t let the navel-gazing linger for too long. But the therapy sessions are amped up for dramatic purposes here in a way that feels unnatural. Somehow, all of Brooke’s patients end up getting prickly and confrontational with her. (For a more true-to-life portrait of therapy, I highly recommend the Showtime docuseries Couples Therapy.)"
• For all its plot-to-plot unevenness (which it shares with the earlier seasons) this In Treatment has great timing: "It is precision targeted to this hopeful-fraught moment when a society is stepping out bleary-eyed from its storm shelter and surveying the debris," says James Poniewozik. "You can quantify deaths, but as Ed Yong recently wrote in The Atlantic about late-pandemic trauma, 'Mental health is harder to measure, and so easier to ignore.'"
• On the practical side, In Treatment's premise is ideally suited for COVID protocols: "Since each episode is a therapy session, it’s a show that’s fundamentally two people in a room talking to each other from a respectful distance," says Daniel Fienberg. "The efficiency goes beyond that, since its unique format — four half-hour episodes per week, focusing on a revolving group of four patients — fills a tremendous amount of programming real estate, even if HBO is doubling up episodes Sundays and Mondays. Thematically, it’s even better. We’re only beginning to understand the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of people who spent 15 months in various degrees of isolation, some only able to get much-needed treatment in a virtual capacity. The experiences of the patients in the new season of In Treatment are individually unique, but something in most of their situations is universal. This all leads to a sense of vitality that carries these new In Treatment episodes over bumpy patches that definitely aren’t specific only to this season."
• To HBO, reviving In Treatment turned out to be an expedient move amid the pandemic: “We were discussing ideas for shows that could be produced with a smaller cast and production footprint — something like In Treatment," explains Casey Bloys, the chief content officer for HBO and HBO Max. “Then the next question was, How about a new version of In Treatment?”
• Co-showrunner Jennifer Schuur says the decision to set In Treatment amid the pandemic but without using masks was a practical one: “When you start to get into the nitty-gritty of that, which I have spent too much time doing, you start to realize you’re not going to want to put your actors in masks,” she explains. “You want them to be able to interact with each other, especially a show like this (that) lives and dies by the actors’ faces.”
• How Uzo Aduba approached tackling her first-ever reboot: "Honestly, I waffled, because this is the first time I’ve ever rebooted something," says Aduba, who hadn't seen the original series. "So I just sat and talked to myself like, 'Am I supposed to be doing Gabriel Byrne?' Because I’m not Irish. I’m not a man. But I was like, 'What is it that I’m meant to be in service to here?' I eventually decided I’m just going to watch the first episode and a bit of the second to get a sense of the tone of the show and the scope of it, because I had never seen a show before where there are only two people in it. It gave me Frost/Nixon vibes, where there are two people in discussion and what we don’t know is where this conversation will lead by its end. That was exciting to me. I also watched a little of it because (Gabriel’s) character had such a huge influence on mine as a mentor. I haven’t watched beyond that. But now that we’re wrapped, I want to see how the show went." As for Aduba's wide-ranging roles, she says: “I always wanted to try and capture as many different versions of existence as possible,” Aduba says. “Never would I have imagined that I would go from playing a character named Suzanne ‘Crazy Eyes’ Warren, who is incarcerated, to playing the first black woman to run for president of the United States as my immediate television follow-up. And it’s not lost on me either to now be on the opposite side of the mental health conversation in Brooke. I’ve gone from Suzanne to this, you know what I mean?” 
• Aduba on dealing with the entitlement, white privilege and misogyny of the patient played by John Benjamin Hickey: "I was really glad that it was a part of the show,” Aduba says. “I thought what was really interesting was examining privilege from someone who, for all intents and purposes, in our public conversation, has all of it, but who has lost it, and how that plays itself out. And what that looks like, and for his safe space to talk about that being in my home. He’s being treated by someone who looks like me, and I think that was really powerful. I also thought there was something really interesting and powerful in why all these stories are important, because what I realized in occupying this seat of a therapist—a Black female therapist—is she’s still a human being out in the world. How she’s had to live as a woman, and as a Black woman in the world, affects how she hears words and language. Her ears are tuned as a woman in certain ways. Her ears are tuned as a Black woman in specific ways.”
• Aduba began working on In Treatment as she dealt with the death of her mother last November by going to therapy: “What I didn’t realize,” Aduba says, “is I don’t have to do life without her.” She adds that her mom has become a part of her. “I am her," she says.