On IN TREATMENT (the "Gabriel Byrne is a hot Irish psychiatrist" show)

Anyone else watching the Gabriel Byrne therapist show IN TREATMENT? It's the only show I've ever known to drive me to drink, Dan-Backslide-style. Seriously, I almost can't watch this show while sober. And even then, it hurts.

Because here's the thing: the show is brilliant. Every episode is a showcase of writing and acting* brilliance. Every. Single. Episode. Even the worst ones have moments that hit the writer and/or actor in me and make me sick to my stomach with how goddamned great they are by doing so very little.

And even then, it's not brilliant in a fun or exhilarating way, in the way many call LOST brilliant. This is brilliant in a "claw open your chest, crack open your ribs with a ball peen hammer, and then smear the insides with salt" kind of way. Each of Paul's patients are all deeply fucked-up in their own deeply fucked-up ways, human and complex and often disturbingly recognizable, and Paul himself...

... you know how you can start calling lines before characters even say them? That happens even on LOST. "You just killed everyone on that boat." Who the hell DIDN'T hear Ben's "So?" coming?

But on IN TREATMENT, Paul as therapist never, ever replies in that predictable, human manner, no matter how emotionally compromised he may be at the moment. In some of the most heated bits, when anybody else would be screaming back at these neurotic crazy people--some of whom are directly trying to attack Paul himself--he deflects that back like I imagine any good therapist would with another probing question.

That is, until you get to the episodes where Paul visits HIS psychiatrist (Diane Weist, in a beautifully and subtly manipulative performance) and all the anger and resentment he's been bottling up over the other sessions comes pouring out. And of course, he's as fucked-up as any of them.

Which one can tend to forget when watching the other episodes, where he never talks about himself, doing his job and keeping the focus entirely on the patients. You can almost slip into the mentality that you're watching one-act plays, stand-alone stories, and miss all the many, many little tiny connective tissues about how each subplot affects the others, and how Paul's emotions shape his motivations with how he handles his patients. Layers upon layers, so subtle that repeat viewings might be necessary, but I dunno if I could handle that. I guess it all depends on how the final episodes of this season go, which I have yet to watch.

Good lord, and I haven't even seen Season One yet.

IN TREATMENT. So good it kills your soul a little bit five times a week. BYOB.




*Besides Byrne and Weist, you have heart-stopping performances by Hope Davis (who plays the most some of the most engagingly off-putting characters out there), Allison Pill (one of those "holy crap, she's just a bit younger than me and she can act like that? Kill me now" actors), and John Mahoney (god, Frasier's Dad has gotten old).

I've never thought, "Man, what I would give to be on this show" before for any other series, but to have the opportunity to work with that kind of material, in that setting, to be pushed to performances like those... I would seriously eat a puppy for a shot at getting cast in IN TREATMENT.

Seriously. A whole puppy. It's Gabriel Byrne, ladies, don't tell me you wouldn't do the same for that reason alone.

"Same old, same old... some people need killin'." An Overview of JONAH HEX

Yesterday, they leaked the first picture of Josh Brolin as certified badass Jonah Hex:



( Hex, for those who don't know, is one of the most hardcore motherfuckers in the long history of DC Comics. Sort of a cross between the Man With No Name and Conan the Barbarian, with a dash of Harvey Dent thrown in... )

I'm still undecided if he looks better this way or if they'd have gone full "Two-Face in DARK KNIGHT" CGI with the scarring (oddly enough, they gave Eckhart!Harvey the Jonah Hex connective mouth tissue touch).

Of course, the movie sounds like it could be a load of ass anyway. While I agree that going the supernatural Lansdale route would be the way to go for a feature film rather than a straightforward western (even though that's where the very best Hex stories are found, if the current series is any indication), the plot concept of John Malkovich as a voodoo practitioner raising an undead army of Confederate soldiers doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Also, at the risk of outing myself as a homosexual/eunuch/houseplant... between her bogging down TRANSFORMERS and her recent "Wonder Woman is lame" comments, I have to confess that Megan Fox and her lack of internal organs does nothing for me..

But Brolin as Hex... for that alone, there are possibilities. Here's hoping the performance is sufficiently grizzled, and that it actually stirs up interest in the character's series, which I'm still frankly amazed has avoided cancellation for this long. No one seemed to read it when I worked at the shop, and I never see scans of it on scans_daily. I'd rectify that if I had the free time.