Working It Out: Couples Therapy as Performance Art

A later episode of the debut Showtime series Couples Therapy features a wedding montage. Harvested from personal archives, the footage depicts real-life couples in their respective matrimonial costumes. They smile and preen for the camera, appearing as they should in their tuxedos and lovely white dresses: euphoric, beguiled, never more full of love and promise. In this the images stand in contrast to the rest of the show, which documents these same couples some years later—now in crisis, unsure of themselves, one another, and how to proceed.

That both states exist on video suggests a bind of its own, the wadding of already loaded public rituals and private relationships with yet more layers of performance and representation. Nested within a docuseries that chronicles marital impasse, the wedding footage is more poignant for appearing a little outshone. The drama of seeking guidance—alone and together—now rivals that of matrimony in the narrative canon of modern life. Which means it too must be ritualized, performed, documented in the style of the real, acquiring along the way its own aesthetic, a set of narrative constraints and formal signifiers.

That process finds new and old expression in Couples Therapy, the bulk of which was shot on a soundstage replica of the office of a New York City therapist named Orna Guralnik. The series condenses six months' worth of weekly therapy sessions; the couples were cast from over a thousand applicants. The producers sought participants whose need for help was genuine, or at least outweighed their desire to play a couple in crisis on TV. In its rough outline the show replicates the premise of Esther Perel's Where Should We Begin?, a podcast in which Perel counsels one couple per hour-long episode. Created by Weiner directors Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman and producer Eli Despres, Couples Therapy toggles between its subjects, stitching different sessions together to form each half-hour show.

Eager to distance itself from its relationship-drama-obsessed reality-TV kin (another Couples Therapy, featuring off-brand celebrities like Joe Francis and Courtney Stodden, aired on VH1 from 2012 to 2015), the show flaunts its own propriety. What, after all, is more civilized than attending couples therapy in downtown Manhattan? Guralnik's office is a tweedy womb of earth and moss tones. Flattering, even afternoon light anoints recessive furniture. Most conspicuous is Guralnick's dog, Nico, a mini husky who greets patients sweetly and respectfully before making a tactful retreat to her bed, and who can be glimpsed looking bored but not entirely uninterested in the discussions that ensue.

The couples, likewise, are well-spoken, impeccably groomed, and appropriately diverse, with knotted, enigmatic, but generally low-octane complaints. Lauren and Sarah have opened their relationship and struggle with whether or not to have a child; Evelyn and Alan are stuck in a vertiginous power dynamic, one needy and Couples Therapy
Directed by Eli B. Despres,
Josh Kriegman, and
Elyse Steinberg
Showtime, 2019
9 episodes
one aloof; Elaine and DeSean can't agree on how much to expect from each other and from their marriage; it's hard to know where to start with Annie and Mau, who in their third decade of marriage appear from moment to moment either rock solid or spectacularly wrong for each other.

The cameras are hidden and the crew effaced, part of a shooting mandate centered on the look and feel of realness, and on keeping the dynamics of an actual session as close to intact as possible. The result is impressive, which is to say it satisfies even the most discriminating taste for performed authenticity. The subjects appear to speak openly, spill without self-consciousness, have moments of revelation, if not surrender. But the session-jumping format prevents a satisfying depiction of any one couple's predicament. Though we watch them come and go, pick at or ignore each other in the waiting room, shift and grimace and occasionally go deep on the couch, the show resists character-building and well-defined arcs.

Instead the couples merge into a larger design, one that applies a humane skepticism to...