Couch surfing

Photograph: Claudette Bourius

Watching fictional therapy sessions may not seem like a fun night of TV, given that you turn to the boob tube to escape your own fucked-up life. But In Treatment—a new 30-minute drama from HBO—isn’t some chin-stroking feel-bad talkathon. It’s the cable network’s first telenovella. “That’s how I always thought of it, as a nuclear-powered soap opera,” says executive producer Rodrigo Garcia, who adapted the concept from an Israeli series and directed about half of the 45 episodes. “You’ve got parent-child conflict, sexual conflicts and misunderstanding, indiscretion and infidelity. It has all the makings of melodrama, but it also has a dose of other things.”

Like Latin American megasoaps, In Treatment isn’t an indefinite series à la All My Children: The patients’ individual plot threads add up to a larger, unifying story with a beginning, middle and end, all featuring the buttoned-down therapist Paul (Gabriel Byrne). Each night brings viewers a different case. Monday’s episodes feature Laura (Alias’ Melissa George), a needy young physician; Tuesdays we get Alex (Blair Underwood), a vainglorious naval aviator; Sophie (Mia Wasikowska), a teen gymnast with two broken arms, visits Wednesdays; and Amy and Jake (Embeth Davidtz and Josh Charles), a couple divided by her desire for an abortion, see Paul on Thursdays. The Friday episodes are built around Paul’s own sessions with his therapist, Gina (Dianne Wiest). You’ve always suspected your shrink was as messed up as you; this guy and his depressing marriage confirm it.

“Beyond the story lines you’re following is Paul’s own crisis,” says Garcia. “Some [of the stories] end well, some end not so well, some are somewhat unresolved, though they don’t just cut off. All of them bring Paul to a new place in his life. And one thing that’s interesting about Paul is that nothing human is foreign to him,” Garcia continues. “He gets involved with his patients and their problems to a fault—that’s what Gina would say. She’s more of a classic authority figure who cuts to the quick.”

Garcia, son of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, has long been one of HBO’s go-to directors (he’s done episodes of Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, as well as the pilot for Big Love). Like many of the network’s programs, the series adopts an unsentimental but sympathetic view of its characters; nonetheless, it was the concept that hooked Garcia. “I thought it was something that would translate very easily to many countries and different cultures because it’s very much about daily problems you can relate to,” he says. But while New York and psychotherapy may be inexorably linked in the American mind, Garcia felt setting the action in a leafy, unnamed suburb was the best way to emphasize the universal nature of the characters’ problems. “I didn’t want it to seem like a highbrow series about L.A. glitterati or New York intelligentsia,” he says. “I wanted it to come across as what it is: middle-class people in therapy for different reasons.”

In Treatment premieres Mon 28 at 9:30pm on HBO.