season 4 review

Thanks for the link hownos!!

Great stuff !!!

it asks the viewer to do something complicated — extrapolate nuanced truths about a doctor from their interactions with their patients — with some very simple tools. Aduba’s Dr. Brooke Taylor sees three people, each broadly drawn personality types built around fairly rudimentary “twists.” They present one way, and we quickly and easily see that they’re really something else. They’re often, in fact, the opposite of how they seem!

A character played by John Benjamin Hickey seems like an attempt to cram in every hot-button issue of the moment it was written — he’s a tech-world white-collar criminal with complicated views on race and gender who considers himself a victim of cancel culture. Hickey does his best, but he’s playing a provocation, not a person. These sessions exist uneasily next to more carefully written episodes about Anthony Ramos’ home health aide character, who either is exhibiting drug-seeking behavior or is caught in the mental health system.

Her enclave, an architectural marvel bathed in golden Los Angeles light, is a the ultimate safe space — and each episode, she lets the world come in, with all its possibilities and perils. The fact that her patients are often laughably blind to defense mechanisms she, and we, can easily decode is irritating and gratifying in turn; it also turns Brooke’s safest space into a staging-ground. (Her stunning irritation when the Swindell character’s grandmother attempts to see private areas of the home is an early sign of just how besieged Brooke feels.)