Couples Therapy is back to unlock a hidden world: other people's relationships. It plants a camera crew in the weekly therapy sessions of four couples, and manages to steer clear of reality-show caricatures.
Couples Therapy follows world-renowned psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik as she deftly guides couples through real-life therapy sessions. The series brings viewers into the intimate sessions to witness the conflicts – and extraordinary breakthroughs – typically hidden behind closed doors.
The second part of season four, now streaming on SBS On Demand, invites viewers back to the couch, where Dr. Orna Guralnik navigates a thorny brew of recriminations, conflict and painful truths with four new couples.
Guralnik delves into the crisis of a deaf man and his hearing partner torn between sexual freedom and commitment, a young couple haunted by trauma and buried secrets, a long-married pair trapped in cycles of bickering and avoidance and a therapist-writer duo locked in a zero-sum battle of sacrifice and grievance that pushes Orna to question her own methods.
Guralnik deftly guides the couples through the minefield of honest confrontation with each other and with themselves; she calls them out when she needs to, and discloses her own concerns about the power she wields with other people's lives, in extraordinarily private moments behind closed doors.
(L-R): Josh, Orna Guralnik, PsyD and Molly in COUPLES THERAPY, Episode 4.11. Source: Courtesy of Showtime
The answer is yes: You can film people at their most vulnerable, as their relationship is in crisis, and avoid making the experience exploitative, or something akin to Real Housewives with better production values.
Let's not kid ourselves that there isn't an element of voyeurism in watching the participants go through the wringer about their sex lives, their childhoods, their traumas. But the process itself isn't set up to exploit their pain, and co-producers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg manage to walk an ethical minefield, to achieve something truly remarkable.
Stream free On Demand
Couples Therapy
