“In therapy” at Arte second season: addictive substance with soul – media

So there it is again, that melodic, understated ding-dong, therapist Doctor Philippe Dayan’s doorbell. Oh, by the doorbell! This ringing is addressed to us again in the second season, just like the ringing in the theater. Take your seats, we’re about to start.

When the first season of the grandiose French series In therapy ran at Arte, it was such a small miracle, as it often happens in the series business when the audience begins to love something so fiercely that one would not have believed this moody, easily lost clientele capable of it. A miracle that was absolutely incalculable, In therapy became the most successful Arte series to date, with a total of 50 million video views in the media library and an average of 1.8 million viewers per episode on television. And what a wonderful trick with a piece of furniture: those on the TV couch really want to see those on the therapy couch.

So it rings again, Dayan maybe finishes some small chore, straightens up, gets his concentrated listener face and opens the door. In therapymodeled on the Israeli series BeTipul Conceived by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, season one consisted essentially of conversations during sessions between Doctor Dayan (Frédéric Pierrot) and his patients. It’s just other people who ring the doorbell for the meeting in the same sequence of days of the week that is obviously extremely calm for Dayan. And then they talk about their needs and fears on the red couch and work on them with Dayan in his leather chair, who is always approachable and not so easily fooled.

Doctor Dayan is now divorced, slightly feral in hair growth, and has new patients

But the crucial point was in season one: Dayan worked on the psyche of the whole injured country at the same time. His patients were sore internally in very different ways from the terrorist attacks in November 2015, it was the sensational venture of weaving in a national trauma in a way that was very good for binge-watching. In the case of Adel Chibane, for example, a police officer in a special unit, the processing of the shock operation in the Bataclan gradually, almost psychoforensically, back to a repressed massacre that he witnessed as a child. And when the patients were gone, the few sequences outside the therapy room saw the quiet, patient Dayan tangle himself, confiding in his supervisor (played with great dignity by Carole Bouquet), and wooing the beautiful ones , complicated trauma surgeon Ariane (Mélanie Thierry) – which according to the professional rules he should never have given in to – finally gave in.

The new season begins four years after these events. In just a few shots, she outlines the new situation – Dayan divorced, slightly overgrown hair, house in the suburbs, run out of coffee – and then, improbable as it is, quickly recreates the same tension with the new protagonists. The doctor has to face a trial, because the policeman Adel finished his therapy, went to Syria to fight against the IS and died. His family sees this death as a kind of suicide that his doctor should have prevented. The first episode connects past and future: Dayan meets the lawyer Inès while preparing for the trial with his lawyer (the matter later allows for a small escapade into the genre of the court film). Twenty years ago she was his patient, now she’s going to be one again, the guilt of having an abortion at 17, a curse from her dominant family and an unfulfilled desire to have children are what drives her. When they meet again, she whispers to him, “You still owe me a child.”

Corona now hangs above everything instead of terror; France had much stricter lockdowns than Germany for months. The old manager Alain storms into the practice with all his digital equipment and is looking for crisis management: An employee killed herself in the home office. Architecture student Lydia ignores the fact that her life is in danger. Léonora and Damien, last season’s disaster couple, are now sending their son Robin to Dayan. This much can be revealed: Philippe Dayan does several things that go beyond the tasks of a therapist. His new supervisor, Claire Brunet, leads him back to his own family history, although he is reluctant to do so. This Claire is played remarkably tender and reserved by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is not only a wonderful actress, but whose family with mother Jane Birkin and sister Lou Doillon belongs to the nobility in the French cultural scene, so to speak. And of course this cast says something about the nimbus that In therapy has in France.

Open detailed view

If you want to decode the enormous success, the pull that is different in the new season but just as strong as the first, then perhaps with its principle of storytelling itself. Is it perhaps this tricky experimental arrangement that, now that the novel is supposedly dead, enables another, ideal form for contemporary storytelling? The psychology of a character, which other stories otherwise have to establish at great expense, is conveniently the main theme of the plot. And the outside, which the camera claims does not come into this room, is of course still there: you can see everything in front of you, the apartment of the lawyer Inès, the Corona station, where Dayan met his father for the first time Visited for years, the wild sea from Alain’s childhood, the whole world. We may not all be couch-ready, but we’re all eager for good storytelling. Or like the famous sentence that Dayan once quoted: “We live because we tell stories.”

Under the pretense of therapy, this small series actually tells a great social novel. And since, conveniently, all episodes are only 20 to 30 minutes long, the chasms basically feel manageable, much like calorie counts for very small portions – which of course never stop there. You learned a lot in the first season about the sugary addictive substance of alien, somehow familiar, tangled souls.

In therapy, Arte, Thursdays, 10:30 p.m., five episodes each; all episodes and the first season in the Arte media library.

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