1st Season: Laura us annoying

Seeing Season 1 for the second time, the Laura episodes are almost unwatchable. She and Alex are written in such a cartoonish style that they seem out of keeping with the rest of the week.

I am watching them though since the compare-and-contrast, cross-referencing style of the show makes that kind of mandatory. I look at them as the cartoon before the main feature of the rest of the week.

Laura was actually my favorite to watch. She could tell a great story and the underlying love between the two was amazing, subtle and beautiful in its own way.

I LOVE the Laura character. I think she is definitely not part of the story or character studies to be 'liked'. These people are all flawed and as a previous poster stated 'In Treatment' because they have problems, are varying in their response to 'treatment', and have different levels of awareness in terms of how to control a session. Melissa George ( love or hate her) is very good in this role. She doesn't shy away from unloveable characters and I think her character is absolutely the best catalyst to test Paul's personal and professional boundaries.

Yes, but it typecasts not the actors but the characters themselves. I was interested in Laura, and Sophie most of all. But by the fourth week of sessions, I began to notice that the stories were all written by the same author.

One common theme in Season 1 was all the actresses are succesful women. They all use their professional vernacular. Embeth Davidtz is the stereotypical go-getter. Mia Waschowki is a top level athlete. And Laura, melissa george's character, who was very sullen, almost human in the first two sessions uses the term "I am a doctor" in every episode thereafter, as if saying: Look I can analyze the analyzer. It just seemed like his patients used too many terms that normal people don't use.

I kept feeling like all three lead actors were the same person with the same work lives and all betrayed by men who were older or let them down. It just seemed like very tired writing. But I still really, really like the show because of the cast & production of HBO. But the show just lacks something that good therapy provides, ie Closure. This show has characters revealing flaws and never quite being able to redeem their past mistakes. And usually, it is too little, too late.

However, I still look forward to watching Season 2.

I am watching the series for the first time on Amazon Prime and am only up to
session 1, episode three. Each episode seems to get better. But, episode 1 was boring for me, enough so that I almost threw in the towel on the series. Fortunately I stuck around for episode two, which featured the brilliant interplay between Paul and the character played by Blair Underwood and that seriously hooked me in.

Episode 1's flaw was that it had far more dialogue from Laura and minimal from Paul which I found boring. In Treatment works best when there is more of a two way conversation. Of course, the patient has to do most of the talking. But Paul's genius comes from being a great listener and zeroing in on just the right question to ask at just the right time to get the patient to open up.

I loved Melissa George's performance in The Slap, both the aussie and yank versions. Hopefully, future episodes featuring Laura will be less woe is me prima donna dialogue from Laura.

lolarites^

"I can imagine every patient being somewhat annoying to a therapist, at least at first."


In my experience, most therapists enter the field because they really want to help people.

Many people who train as therapists are 'natural' therapists prior to training -- they have been those folks whom friends and family members have naturally flocked to over the years for advice and/or their sheer willingness to 'listen' to them and 'be there' for them -- some have been this way even since childhood. Because of years of amateur yet real-world practice, many already have a wide tolerance for behaviors that others might find 'annoying' or otherwise distressing, before they even enter the field to eventually become professionals.

Therapists are trained to handles situations that laypeople might find emotionally provocative -- uncomfortable feelings are part and parcel of their trade. In other words, what might be construed as 'annoying' to someone not trained as a therapist could be considered as somewhat 'typical' to a trained professional -- that professional would not/should not have the same response to certain emotional and emotion-provoking situations as a non-professional might.

It's kind of like comparing a non-medical person who feels faint at the sight of blood with a doctor who has been trained to not only see and work in bloody situations, but who is able to keep her/his wits about them and proceed professionally.

Finally, therapists are trained to handle all sorts of situations, including transference and counter-transference of both positive and negative feelings. That doesn't mean that a good therapist might not find him/herself in a unique type of transference/counter-transference situation that might have the potential to lead that therapist astray, but that therapist has been trained to recognize the 'warning bells' of such situations and so should know to seek his/her own therapy. If the therapist doesn't do that, then there is either something wrong with his/her training or s/he is ignorantly, and sometimes selfishly, choosing to ignore those warning signals.




"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than..a rude remark or a vulgar action" Blanche DuBois

I can see Laura in some women I know, the most annoying thing for me was the constant sniffing.

I agree Pauls wife was the character I was most unsympathetic to, probably because they had problems without real explanation and the tension was already in place.