Despite the new set of episodes of Couples Therapy being designated by Showtime as a continuation of Season 4, Dr. Orna Guralnik sees four new couples, picked from a larger set of couples who agreed to see the psychologist on camera in exchange for free sessions. As usual, we see a montage of the couples that didn’t make the final cut before really getting into the couples the show’s producers decided were the most interesting to follow.
Opening Shot: Sand goes through the hourglass in the soundstage office of Dr. Orna Guralnik. A patient says, “I feel like my body has been in fight or flight every second of 20 years.”
The Gist: Rod and Alison have been married for 18 years. They snipe at each other frequently, with their 10-year-old daughter being “moderator,” as Rod says. Alison doesn’t even realize that she has a tone when she talks half the time, and Rod tends to shut down once they get into a skirmish. Boris and Jessica have been together 8 years, and it seems that Jessica has put her ambitions aside for Boris’ desire to find someplace that felt like home, including when he got a tenure-track teaching position in Montana. Because he lived with his immigrant parents in New York, he wanted to be somewhere else, but Jessica’s new job has brought them back, and he’s miserable.
Kyle and Mondo, who have been together for 6 years, struggle because Mondo feels like he sometimes has to be the adult in the relationship. During COVID, for instance, he had to be the interpreter for Kyle, who is hearing impaired and reads lips, because communication was difficult when everyone was masked. Kyle wants to open up the relationship and Mondo isn’t sure.
Finally, there’s Nick and Katherine, who have been together 14 years. During an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica, Katherine found that Nick has some long-buried pain. Katherine is distressed that Nick hasn’t been able to open up when not under the influence of psychoactive substances. His mother’s death engendered a lot of anger towards her that pushed down the grief, which came out during the retreat.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Couples Therapy Season 1 through the first half of Season 4.
Our Take: We’ve mentioned before how, while Couples Therapy is certainly a voyeuristic experience, it’s certainly not exploitative of the people who agree to have therapy on camera. The big reason is that Guralnik is such an effective therapist, drilling down to why the members of a couple feel the way they do, and really listening for asides and thrown-off remarks that she can drill down on to reveal the emotions that led to those remarks.
But the other big reason why it doesn’t feel exploitative is that the couples’ issues are more universal than they likely think. When you watch with your SO, you find yourself nodding, pausing, and discussing what the couple on screen is going through, because the two of you have likely been through something similar, or had a similar disagreement that seems to constantly recur.
Guralnik is her usual empathetic and incisive self, getting quickly involved in the emotions of each couple and taking them on herself to help them sort through things. As we get started with a new set of couples, their issues feel slightly generic — there’s no throuple this season, like there was in the first half of Season 4 — but it does feel like each member of the featured couples are willing to listen and not try to “drive the therapeutic bus,” as we’ve called it in the past.
Sex and Skin: The couples talk about their sex lives but not in any real detail.
Parting Shot: As Guralnik talks to her clinical advisor, Dr. Virginia Goldner, about how some people need couples therapy to get into the hidden issues they haven’t been able to talk about, we see the couples at home.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Alison, simply because of the New Kids On The Block sweater she wore to the first session.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Nick talked about feeling something in his “root chakra dantian area,” we wondered if the usually-open Guralnik thought he was talking gibberish or not.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Couples Therapy continues to be an engaging, and often fascinating, look at what brings couples to the breaking point, and how they’re willing to do the work to make things better.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.