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The “reality” television series Couples Therapy achieves something we might have thought impossible: allowing the audience into actual therapy sessions. The fly-on-the-wall style gives us a real sense of what it is like to be amid couple therapy: the nervousness, the sudden rising fury and talking over each other, the painful silences. Dr Orna Guralnik also gives us a window into what it is like to struggle along the couple's side as a therapist. All psychotherapists have their own version of “the frame”, and Guralnik's might seem a bit informal to some. When departing patients ask for a hug, they get one. Her adorable dog attends every session, and the couples seem to welcome his domestic presence. However informal her style, the extracts we see of Guralnik's work resonate with her training as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst.
New York-based couples were seen twenty times over an eight-month period, including during lockdown, and their stories are intercut. Each series (two so far) and thirty-minute episode focuses on three or four couples, interweaving extracts from their sessions. Perhaps the key to the show's success is that the creator, Josh Kriegman, is himself the son of two psychotherapists. Kriegman wanted to find a way to convey the agonies and the breakthroughs of couple therapy he had heard his parents describe. In a recent interview, Kriegman described his father telling him that “if there was a way to film this, it would not only be compelling and dramatic and just fascinating, but it would also be useful. People would learn a lot about the process of what goes on here” (IndieWire, 2021).
To capture every nuance, pregnant pause, and raised eyebrow, Kriegman knew he needed several cameras trained on each participant. His team designed a set that concealed the crew and cameras behind artworks, books, and mirrors to give the chosen couples as near a genuine experience as possible. The set convinces as a bookish therapist's office, and we can almost