Unscripted TV about relationships tends to be fueled by cynical impulses and sensationalized conflict. There’s a nervousness that audiences are only interested in an outrageous collision of bright lighting, alcohol and drama goaded by unseen producer manipulation. “Couples Therapy,” now in its second season on Showtime, is something different entirely: A sincere look at sorting through the twists and wrinkles that can make living with a partner (but also living with yourself) feel so miserable.
It’s one of the most unlikely shows on television. By turns moving, uncomfortable and raw, it is also unquestionably entertainment, rooted in a nosy voyeuristic curiosity about what happens behind closed doors. Executive producers Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg and Eli Despres navigate that invasive cringe factor with a series of confident, stylistic decisions that convincingly make the case that a grounded sensibility within the reality TV genre doesn’t result in something dry or dull or boring. It’s actually riveting and incredibly human.
In the cozy office of Dr. Orna Guralnik, the therapist at the show’s center, the cameras are tucked away and unseen, even by the show’s participants. The room itself feels comfortably lived-in, with knickknacks and books and mid-century furniture upholstered in warm colors — the muted gray of Guralnik’s chair opposite the terra cotta couch where the couples sit. Guralnik’s dog, Nico, accompanies her to the office. He looks like a shrunken husky and he is quiet and sweet and greets her patients when they arrive. There’s an overall informality to the environment, but the work that happens inside is serious. The realities of COVID-19 intrude in the first half of the season, but only briefly — the couples and Guralnik start doing sessions remotely in one episode, but are back in-person by the end of the next. (Back in December, Showtime aired a one-off special focusing on the strain a variety of couples experienced during the early months of the stay-at-home order.)
The success of “Couples Therapy” as a viewing experience rests entirely on Guralnik’s shoulders. A clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, there’s something reassuring about her presence. She has a soft vocal timbre, but she’s very intentional about the way she speaks and the words she chooses and the way she navigates each session. She’ll laugh. She’ll smile. She’ll lean forward and nod. But she’ll also push. Pretty firmly if needed. She is thoughtful and warm and empathetic — a careful listener, alert to nuances her patients miss in the heat of the moment.
On her website, she talks about focusing on unconscious thoughts and feelings that end up shaping our moods and behaviors. A lot of that work is what we see on the show.
A gay couple and two straight couples are the main focus of the season. (All are in their 20s and 30s; if there’s a third season it would be interesting to see older couples at a different life stage featured as well.) Every so often we see Guralnik check in with her clinical adviser, and it’s in these moments that we get to hear thoughts about couples therapy in general.
“People come in convinced that the problem lives in their partner,” she says at one point. “And what they’re going to ask me to do is help them change their partner so that life gets better. But that’s not the work of couples therapy.” What often happens, instead, is that people are forced to look inward: Why do I react this way? And once we start to unravel some ideas about that, can I step back and realize that I’m not locked into this way of being?
Often Guralnik encounters resistance. Of course there’s resistance. “They come with their own highly developed narratives about what’s going on,” she says, “and here I come and try to disrupt those narratives and people don’t like it. Sometimes people fight me tooth and nail about it.”
Michal and Michael are a prime example. Married for 11 years, their fights escalate with alarming speed: “You literally do nothing,” Michal tells her spouse at their first session. “You are so lazy, your existence is worthless right now. It’s absolutely worthless.” I don’t know how a relationship comes back from that kind of blow. But Michael seems unfazed.
On the surface, she’s the impatient, domineering wife, and he’s the shrinking, shrugging, smirking husband, but it’s so much more complicated than that. And to see them work through their individual and joint issues over a period of months is fascinating. They really are in a better place by the series’ end.
That’s true of the two other couples as well. Life is complicated and exhausting and sometimes you can feel trapped in a cycle that wears you down. Just the irritations of another human being in your personal space are hard enough, let alone the deeper emotional baggage we all bring to relationships. But the couples here make real and substantial progress. Will it last? Even they express concern, but the show is so wonderfully optimistic about the possibility of doing things differently.
“Couples form this world between them, in which they come to assume all sorts of things,” Guralnik muses, “as if that’s, of course, just the truth. (But) if you stand a little outside that structure, you realize that is not the truth, that is the mini-universe that you’ve created for yourselves. If you step out of it for one second, everything you thought was completely true is not necessarily so, and you can see it totally differently.
“If you can give couples just a hint of that, you can release them from dogged, grooved-in conflict that they assume must be.”
It’s hard to change the way you think. The way you perceive things. The way you react to things. That’s why therapy is a process. But nobody is doomed to perpetual conflict and discord, the show suggests, not if you’re willing to really examine how and why you got to this moment. There’s something so deeply reassuring in that.
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'COUPLES THERAPY'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Running time: The season is nine half-hour episodes
Where to watch: Showtime
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