Do you have a video playback issues?
Please disable AdBlocker in your browser for our website.
Due to a high volume of active users and service overload, we had to decrease the quality of video streaming. Premium users remains with the highest video quality available. Sorry for the inconvinience it may cause. Donate to keep project running.
COUPLES THERAPY unlocks a hidden world: other people's relationships. Far from reality-show caricatures, this is true documentary filmmaking that brings viewers into authentic and visceral experience of weekly therapy with four couples.
Couples Therapy also delivers on a fantasy familiar to anyone who's been in therapy of any kind, joint or solo, following Guralnik out of her own workplace and into that of her clinical adviser, Dr. Virginia Goldner.
While the Showtime series may inspire some visits to couples' therapists offices, I think it will mostly help destigmatize a process that usually occurs behind closed doors.
"Couples Therapy" is much better when the couch in question is a neutral and therapeutic space, rather than the well-worn, upholstered lump where we've spent the past 10 months slowly losing our grip.
The reveals are somewhat slow, something anyone who's been through therapy themselves will not find surprising - but the breakthroughs are illuminating.
The special uses four couples to offer surprisingly insightful generalizations about human relationships: our difficulty articulating our vulnerabilities, and our defensiveness or resistance when hearing them expressed by others.
Guralnik is a picture of cool, even when a patient is staring her down and doubting her magnanimousness. If she's not magnanimous, she's at least remarkably wise, routinely saying things that viewers may find useful
Couples Therapy breaks new ground with its camera, capturing the stalemates and breakthroughs in shifting gazes, unsaid interjections, raised eyebrows.
And, yes, while a show like this smacks of voyeurism, its view into the therapy processes of couples in counseling with Dr. Orna Guralnik over six months is instructive as opposed to exploitative.
Sometimes you are tempted to laugh at the show's participants, as in the above example, but then you realize that these are just normal people exposing their most intimate thoughts.
The series, created by the team behind the documentary Weiner, is ostensibly about untangling romantic relationships, but its lessons hold up whether or not you have a mate.