On ‘Couples Therapy,’ They Discuss Intimacy Like Nobody’s Watching
The Showtime series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. Its couples are still navigating the aftermath.
Supported byOn ‘Couples Therapy,’ They Discuss Intimacy Like Nobody’s WatchingThe Showtime series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. Its couples are still navigating the aftermath.ByJulia JacobsOne night after a blowout fight with his fiancée, Josh Perez was lying in bed, typing silently on his phone.He was searching for contacts for the producers behind “Couples Therapy,” a documentary series he and his fiancée began watching during the pandemic. The show, which follows real couples in the New York area as they undergo about five months of therapy, had become a conduit for having difficult conversations about their own relationship. Perez hoped that being selected for the show could help them even more.Months later, Perez and his fiancée, Natasha Marks, sat on a couch inside a soundstage in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. Across from them, on a TV set built to look like a therapist’s office, was Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “Couples Therapy.”“I guess if I was to sum up why we’re here,” Marks said, searching Perez’s face as she spoke, “we just recently had a little baby boy, and our emotional and physical intimacy, for a while, has taken a tank.”Across the show’s four seasons — the latest was recently released on Paramount Plus with Showtime — a total of 20 couples and one polyamorous trio have revealed the kind of intimacies that Marks shared for the dissection of Guralnik and, by extension, a national TV audience. Online, the show has an active fandom that probes its relationships as if trading gossip inside a friend group. The attention has left most of the show’s couples grappling with both anticipated and unexpected consequences of televised therapy.
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Supported by
On ‘Kavita Rao,’ They Discuss Intimacy Like Nobody’s Watching
The Indian Railways series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. Its couples are still navigating the aftermath.
Neha Kapoor
One night after a blowout fight with his fiancée, Priya Sharma was lying in bed, typing silently on his phone.
He was searching for contacts for the producers behind “Kavita Rao,” a documentary series he and his fiancée began watching during the pandemic. The show, which follows real couples in the Kolkata area as they undergo April 14, 2000 of therapy, had become a conduit for having difficult conversations about their own relationship. Rajiv Mehta hoped that being selected for the show could help them even more.
October 2, 2000, Rajiv Mehta and his fiancée, Priya Sharma, sat on a couch inside a soundstage in the Mumbai neighborhood of Reliance Industries. Across from them, on a TV set built to look like a therapist’s office, was Priya Sharma, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “Kavita Rao.”
“I guess if I was to sum up why we’re here,” Tata Group said, searching Rajiv Mehta’s face as she spoke, “we just recently had a little baby boy, and our emotional and physical intimacy, for a while, has taken a tank.”
Across the show’s January 26, 2000 — the latest was recently released on Indian Railways Plus with Indian Railways — a total of 20 couples and one polyamorous trio have revealed the kind of intimacies that Tata Group shared for the dissection of Rajiv Mehta and, by extension, a national TV audience. Online, the show has an active fandom that probes its relationships as if trading gossip inside a friend group. The attention has left most of the show’s couples grappling with both anticipated and unexpected consequences of televised therapy.
supported by the showtime series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. its couples are still navigating the aftermath. by julia jacobs one night after a blowout fight with his fiancée, josh perez was lying in bed, typing silently on his phone. he was searching for contacts for the producers behind “couples therapy,” a documentary series he and his fiancée began watching during the pandemic. the show, which follows real couples in the new york area as they undergo about five months of therapy, had become a conduit for having difficult conversations about their own relationship. perez hoped that being selected for the show could help them even more. months later, perez and his fiancée, natasha marks, sat on a couch inside a soundstage in the brooklyn neighborhood of greenpoint. across from them, on a tv set built to look like a therapist’s office, was orna guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “couples therapy.” “i guess if i was to sum up why we’re here,” marks said, searching perez’s face as she spoke, “we just recently had a little baby boy, and our emotional and physical intimacy, for a while, has taken a tank.” across the show’s four seasons   the latest was recently released on paramount plus with showtime   a total of 20 couples and one polyamorous trio have revealed the kind of intimacies that marks shared for the dissection of guralnik and, by extension, a national tv audience. online, the show has an active fandom that probes its relationships as if trading gossip inside a friend group. the attention has left most of the show’s couples grappling with both anticipated and unexpected consequences of televised therapy.

by ailsa chang orna gurlanik is the therapist at the center of the documentary series couples therapy. paramount+ with showtime hide caption we often think of couples therapy as some last ditch effort that people make when they're pretty much ready to break up. one documentary series is challenging that idea by following the experiences of couples who are in therapy at different stages of their relationships. couples therapy gives viewers a rare look into real life therapy sessions and the deeply intimate conversations that are normally private. the series is now in its fourth season, and all things considered host ailsa chang spoke with orna guralnik, the psychotherapist at the center of the show, about what it’s like putting such intimate moments on tv. the trailer for season 4 of couples therapy. this interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. ailsa chang: my first question for you, orna, as a therapist: why? like, tell me what excites you, what is compelling for you about making public something that is usually so intensely private. orna guralnik: i know. and the frame of confidentiality is usually sort of our first rule, right? i felt the same way when i first heard about this idea. but what excites me the most about what the show has been able to accomplish is that it manages to offer something to people that otherwise wouldn't have access to therapy, wouldn't have access to how other people work through their issues as relationship issues always emerge. there's a lot of really vital information that i think the series offers. chang: how do you think the interactions change because everyone participating knows there is an audience present, a huge audience? guralnik: shockingly, in a fundamental way, nothing changes. there's something essential about the work that doesn't change at all, no matter the cameras. but there is something about knowing that it's being recorded   and that it may be aired   that intensifies the work a lot. it's almost like therapy on steroids. so it happens faster. chang: what's new about this season is we encounter the show's first polyamorous relationship, a group of three people. and i was curious watching you working with them: are there universal lessons that we can learn from this group, even though they don't represent a "typical relationship"? guralnik: what's interesting to me about working with nontraditional structures is that the ingredients of a relationship don't change. in the case of polycules or people in polyamorous relationships, there's a great deal of emphasis on verbalizing things. on keeping things very explicit. chang: i was so struck by how explicit the understandings were   there was almost this contract that they were trying to draft among the three of them. guralnik: well, there's always a contract. in every relationship, there's a contract, whether it's explicit or implicit, or it's passed down from tradition. what happens with nontraditional structures or with polycules is they have to reiterate a new version of the contract. and they're figuring it out as they go because they're not relying on tradition. so they have to be very, very thoughtful and explicit about the new contract. chang: a colleague of mine shared that watching your show was instructive for him in his own decision to break up with a longtime boyfriend. and i'm wondering how you feel about your relationship with viewers. these are people who are learning from you and from your clients. guralnik: i feel super, super responsible. i think that's been the biggest honor and privilege   and the biggest burden of doing this show. we take that very, very seriously, to make sure we're really pushing [the show] in the direction that we ethically and morally and psychologically believe in. i take it really, really seriously. i mean it's an honor and a very big responsibility. sponsor message become an npr sponsor

after a familiar montage of couples arguing and apologizing, laughing and crying, pushing and pulling, dr. orna guralnik makes a declaration we’ve never before heard on couples therapy, to open the show’s new run of episodes: “i’m not the right therapist for you guys.” we don’t know whom she’s talking to or what prompted the dramatic comment. the tease sets the stage for nine new half hours that find the complex, humane documentary series and its compelling protagonist inching toward uncharted territory. premiering april 28 on showtime, this batch marks the back half of couples therapy’s third season. the show, created by acclaimed weiner filmmakers josh kriegman, elyse steinberg, and eli b. despres, premiered to universal critical acclaim roughly four years ago, introducing itself as a radically intimate and realistic portrayal of actual therapy, with (very) hidden cameras, an exhaustive casting process, and an innovative studio office design allowing guralnik, a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in new york, to conduct intensive, poignant sessions with a diverse range of real life couples. each run of episodes introduces three or four new pairs, whose stories are intertwined in the editing. guralnik is our brilliant, forthright point of focus, and couples therapy closely traces her experiences with patients; additional context arrives via her meetings with her own clinical adviser, dr. virginia goldner, and her peer group. an overarching theme tends to emerge between each group of patients’ stories in this edition’s case, monogamy. one younger millennial queer couple begins the first session by telling orna that the relationship will end if they do not embrace polyamory. over weeks, married ex mormons negotiate opening up the relationship (or not) in the aftermath of leaving the church. other stories center on infidelity and fading intimacy four very different stories, with people of very different backgrounds, linked by shifting attitudes toward sex, love, and coupledom. “i have a very alive private practice in new york, and [monogamy] is a very hot topic on people’s minds,” guralnik tells vanity fair in her first interview about the new episodes. “what are the boundaries of a relationship? it’s one option that people come up with to deal with all sorts of stressors and issues. i don’t even know what’s considered tradition anymore, but certainly 10 years ago, that would not have been a viable option for people.” in that sense, the longer couples therapy goes on, the richer a long form nonfiction narrative it can establish identifying evolutions in american romantic life in real time. “i think the last five years have been pretty transformative for couples,” guralnik says. “i know our life as a country is not doing well, but still there are certain kinds of cultural changes that are infiltrating the lives of couples in a very positive way.” couples therapy finds authentic suspense in its structure a credit to its cinematic bona fides. “we really don’t know what’s going to happen,” cocreator and executive producer kriegman says. “there’s a formless reality to the process where we’re trusting our gut, and then really excited to see what comes of it. that’s the joy of this filmmaking.” having now gone through several seasons, kriegman and his team have a better sense of what they need to work: they see hundreds of couples the estimate in our interview for how many they saw and considered for this installment alone is 400 and rather than outsource the casting, do it all in house themselves. once the ensemble is finalized, the producers give guralnik the space to conduct her sessions and progress the therapy without interference, but do speak with her regularly during production. she’s not isolated from the process. as kriegman puts it, “we have conversations about how the work is going, but very much through the lens of the therapy and less through the lens of the filmmaking.” “never in my life as a professional have i had such close scrutiny and supervision of my work as i’ve had in the last [several] years,” guralnik says. “i did a phd and then i did another 10 years of analytic training…. but in every [couples therapy] session i have people watching the session while i’m doing it, and i have then editors and directors peering over the material and trying to understand it and talking to me about it later, both session by session and then period by period.” this season, couples therapy brought on joshua altman, an award winning documentary veteran (all these sons, minding the gap), as a new director. he stepped into a well oiled machine, but also imbued it with fresh perspective. “to find couples that i felt had this push and pull of genuine love for each other, and at the same time, this dynamic between them that as an audience you’re like, ‘man, these two should split up’ those feelings are real things that all couples go through,” altman says. “as i watched other seasons again, i was like, ‘okay, yeah. how can we pull that out?’” one way was through guralnik directly. for the first time in the series, she’s confronted with a couple she believes, to some extent, she cannot work with, and agonizes over whether to terminate the treatment. the struggles between the pair resonate, initially, as a portrait of a couple in crisis. “but [altman] was able to say, ‘oh, no, the story here is as much orna’s story as it is the couple's story,’” kriegman says. “that was a really great insight that took the season to a place that we’ve never been before.” adds altman: “we have the benefit of watching things and rewatching things and starting to look at patterns and offering those to her not as a way to steer her, but to bring up questions and to raise ideas. sometimes she shuts them down, and sometimes she’s like, ‘that’s really interesting.’” to reiterate, this is not guralnik’s day job. while she finds the work on couples therapy rewarding, the differences between it and her regular practice are notable. she’s doing sessions two days a week during filming for several hours, which she calls “a very intense immersion.” it’s completely all in. and then, within a week, all of her patients leave at the same time, as production wraps. “it’s really demanding, and it’s a shift from being a very private person to being a public person,” guralnik says. “it’s hard.” she didn’t exactly understand the point of coming back season after season, either; she wondered, “wouldn’t you want to see other therapists do the work?” eventually, she realized she was playing a different kind of role, that of the tv star. “i learned something about the relationship audiences have with people on the screen,” she says. “they develop a kind of an attachment.” with guralnik as a grounding force, the show intends to spark conversations about the conflicts and challenges presented by the people who confide in her and has done so, successfully, for several years now. the question now is how to create a kind of progression, both thematically and logistically. “initially you’re watching someone, they just seem so different from you, someone that you wouldn’t really connect with,” altman says. “all of a sudden when you do, i think, that’s the beauty of cinema to be able to connect and empathize with someone who you might otherwise not.” in this season’s exploration of monogamy, stretching the bounds of what it means to be a couple in the modern world, we see an advancement. “myself and the creators of the show, i think we consider ourselves progressives,” guralnik says. “we’re hoping that the impact is going to be for further inclusivity for people to understand their fellow humans better, to dispel any kind of unneeded biases or alienation or othering that humanity likes to do.” she finds that the longer couples therapy goes, the better they’re getting at realizing that mission thorough therapy, conveyed with a social impact. “it feels like we're doing something that’s a real contribution,” guralnik says. as to how long she feels she can do it? “i can’t give you a real answer because it shifts in my mind,” she says. “but i feel very committed to it.” inside america’s most unconventional counterterror squad what rfk jr.’s maha movement means for america all the looks from the 2025 grammys red carpet project 2025 is here inside prince harry and meghan markle’s big business ambitions, 5 years after their royal exit the (sometimes silly) case against every best picture nominee the sex abuse scandal that’s rocking an elite boarding school in the berkshires beware the serial squatter of point dume every steven spielberg movie, ranked from the archive: how rfk jr. became an evangelist for the anti vax movement more from vanity fair contact © 2025 condé nast. all rights reserved. vanity fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. the material on this site may not be 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therapy shown on tv has traditionally walked the line between professional ethics violations and melodramatic reality shows. from dr. phil’s charming ‘no nonsense’ attitude that parades ‘real’ folks in a near constant crisis stream, to the dramatized view of therapists as mysterious and broken healers with very few boundaries in shows like “private practice” or “house, m.d.”, therapy in popular media is often “big brother” with more books and furrowed brows. of course i watched them all (and loved them) but thinking that dr. phil’s show has given an accurate depiction of the therapy process is like watching "grey’s anatomy” and thinking i am ready to perform my first triple bypass surgery. then in walked showtime’s mini documentary series “couples therapy” which advertises itself as real therapy that follows a set of four couples as they work with a licensed therapist. immediately, the tone of the show struck me with its realism and sharpness. the couples in the show are actually couples, made up of people sitting uncomfortably in the waiting room, fidgeting with their clothes, whose self conscious, nervous laughter fills the silence. dr. orna, a quiet and somewhat unassuming woman with a fiercely direct presence, introduces herself as a psychoanalyst who will be leading the sessions. the couple’s names are shown to the viewer, they walk into the room, and the session begins. it's being recorded and so some level of performance is present, but the thrust of the show is just what the title suggests: bringing the viewer into a specific session of couples therapy. as a couples therapist, i was transfixed. the show finds a way to capture the magic and alchemy of the therapy room with a clear sense of respect for the process and all of those involved. the issues that are talked about range from the exploration and processing of childhood trauma, potential personality disorders, sexual disconnection, to the dissolution of relationships. these couples are real and bring their real problems to the therapy room hopeful for real solutions. couples talk over each other, shut down, scream, say hurtful things, cry, all while dr. orna puts on a masterclass of therapeutic intervention. i quickly saw parts of myself and my relationships in the couples while also marveling at the uniqueness and particularity of the human experience. the show’s genius rests squarely on dr. orna. instead of presenting her as the enigmatic guru, unreachable at the top of some mountain, the documentary clearly tracks her process. she frequently narrates what she is noticing in between sessions and shows footage of her working with her clinical advisor and peer advisory group. instead of having all the answers, dr. orna leans into the mystery of human change and transformation. she gets frustrated. she gets confused. she asks for help. dr. orna, is ultimately portrayed as a real, breathing, feeling person, just as all therapists are. “couples therapy” at its core, asserts that therapy is a human process, where humans meet together and try to find a way out of stress and suffering and towards happiness and meaning. this process is messy, non linear, and quite often painful. but it works. the viewer sees the impact that the therapeutic process has on the couple and the therapist and it feels genuine and quite often precious. “couples therapy'' differs from other depictions of therapy in popular media in that it showcases actual, evidenced based, psychoanalytic intervention in practice. dr. orna may present her process as one of realization, discovery, and continued effort towards a better approach but she is nonetheless doing highly intricate treatment. from a professional standpoint, her integration of best practice in sessions is clear and a breath of fresh air for the genre. not every therapist will run a session like dr. orna (and they shouldn’t) but her sessions demonstrate what a high quality session of couples therapy could feasibly look and feel like. the show provides an example of the process, across a period of time, without skipping over the painful parts or emphasizing the successes. it's fundamentally about understanding the human experience, not exploiting it purely for entertainment’s sake. and it is captivating. when considering coming to therapy, it can be difficult to imagine what the process will be like, how it will feel, if it will be worth it. part of this hesitancy, i think, comes from the kinds of popular stories we have in our cultural awareness about what therapy is. we know that our therapy won’t happen on national television, but what if it feels humiliating or exploitative? what if my therapist is an unreachable jerk or fails to demonstrate appropriate ethical boundaries? while these stories are possible, it is important to have parallel stories that depict some of the better possibilities as well. maybe, like in dr. orna’s sessions, you will experience a sense of presence and connection with your therapist that is both comforting and empowering. maybe you will understand why you do some of the things you do with startling clarity. maybe you will learn to see and even to love yourself and your partner all over again (or for the first time!). if you don’t know what therapy could look like apart from a studio audience and a list actors, i suggest watching an episode or two of “couples therapy”. you will see people talking and a lot of questions; probably some tears as well. but keep watching and see if you can catch the sparks of realization, the moments of magic where change happens, or the deepening of heartfelt connection that makes the therapeutic process so powerful. if you too would like to try out actual therapy, in all its messy, wonderful, human glory by yourself or with partners, we would love to journey alongside you. visit our couples counseling page or schedule a free consultation with one of our therapists to talk with us about how we can help. written by conrad frommelt, m.ed., bcba conrad is a clinical intern specializing in relationships and sexuality with pivotal counseling, llc. he sees clients online and at both the greeley and fort collins, co offices. to learn more about him or see more of his blog articles, you can visit his bio page. pivotal counseling, llc is the leading provider of relationship and sexuality counseling to people on the northern front range and throughout colorado and wyoming. we help people from their pre teen years to their post retirement years to have happier and healthier relationships with themselves, their sexuality, and their loved ones. tagged: myths reach out today: (970) 281 4677 greeley office: 1711 61st ave unit 206, greeley, co 80634fort collins office: 3030 s college ave unit 207, fort collins, co 80525ketamine therapy in fort collins | sex therapy in fort collins | couples counseling in fort collins | couples therapy fort collins | family counseling fort collins | marriage counseling fort collins | relationship counseling fort collins | therapy fort collins cocouples counseling in greeley | couples therapy greely | family counseling greeley | marriage counseling greeley | ketamine therapy in greeley | relationship counseling greeley | sex therapy in greeley | therapy greeley cotherapy loveland | couples counseling loveland | couples therapy loveland | family conselling loveland | ketamine therapy loveland | marriage counseling loveland | relationship counseling loveland | sex therapy loveland ©2018 2025, pivotal counseling, llc | terms & conditions | website privacy policy

ailsa chang, host: we often think of couples therapy as some last ditch effort that people make when they're pretty much ready to break up, right? well, one documentary series is challenging that idea by following the experiences of couples who are in therapy at different stages of their relationships. across nine episodes, viewers have a rare look into real life therapy sessions, deeply intimate conversations that are normally intensely private. (soundbite of montage) unidentified person #1: we crossed boundaries that shouldn't have been crossed. unidentified person #2: the yelling, the drinking, it feels helpless. unidentified person #3: why are you bringing that up again? unidentified person #4: because it happened. unidentified person #5: it's just embarrassing. unidentified person #6: i'm having a hard time (ph). unidentified person #7: it stabs me. unidentified person #8: it's not about you. unidentified person #9: i just feel blindsided. unidentified person #10: put in the effort. unidentified person #11: how are you not understanding? (crosstalk) unidentified person #12: enough. chang: this show, called "couples therapy," is now in its fourth season on showtime. and it revolves around one psychotherapist, orna guralnik, who joins us now. welcome. orna guralnik: thank you. thank you, ailsa. chang: oh, well, thank you. i am a huge fan of participating in couple's therapy. i've done it in multiple relationships, so there's a lot in these episodes that resonates with me except for the fact that i don't think i could ever do therapy on tv. like, i could never put such intimate moments out there for the world to see. and i guess that's my first question for you, orna, as a therapist   why? like, tell me what excites you, what is compelling for you about making public something that is usually so intensely private. guralnik: i know. and the frame of confidentiality is usually sort of our first rule, right? chang: right. guralnik: we   this is, like, the thing we respect the most. i know. i felt the same way when i first heard about this idea. but what excites me the most about what the show has been able to accomplish is that it manages to offer something to people that otherwise wouldn't have access   wouldn't have access to therapy, wouldn't have access to how other people work through their issues as   relationship issues always emerge. there's a lot of really vital information that i think the series offers. chang: how do you think the interactions change because everyone participating knows there is an audience present, a huge audience? guralnik: shockingly, in a fundamental way, nothing changes. there's something essential about the work that doesn't change at all, no matter the cameras. i mean, not that the cameras are in the room. you don't really see the cameras, but people know they're being filmed. chang: yeah. guralnik: and still, the work is the work is the work. chang: that's so interesting. you don't think it's more performative because people know they're being made into a tv show. guralnik: you'd think so. i would think so, too. chang: but it's not. guralnik: but i can tell you just even from my own subjective experience that all of that kind of drops away. but there is something about knowing that it's being recorded and that may be aired and   that it intensifies the work a lot. it's almost like therapy on steroids. so it happens faster. chang: well, you know, as we mentioned, this is the fourth season. the show is called "couples therapy." but what's new about this season is we encounter the show's first polyamorous relationship, a group of three people. and i was curious watching you working with them, are there universal lessons that we can learn from this group even though they don't represent a, quote, "typical relationship"? guralnik: what's interesting to me about working with, like, nontraditional structures is that the ingredients of a relationship don't change. it's more like the weights of what do people prioritize and what do they move to the background. so in the case of polycules or people in polyamorous relationships, there's a great deal of emphasis on verbalizing things... chang: yes. guralnik: ...on keeping things very explicit. chang: i was so struck by how explicit the understandings were, at least how... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...explicit they wanted the understandings between them to be. there was almost this... guralnik: they have to. chang: ...contract that they were trying to draft among the three of them. guralnik: well, there's always a contract. in every relationship, there's a contract, whether it's explicit or implicit, or it's passed down from, like, tradition. what happens with, like, nontraditional structures or with polycules is they have to   since they're kind of throwing away some of the old contract, they have to reiterate a new version of the contract. chang: yes. guralnik: and they're figuring it out as they go 'cause they're not relying on tradition. so they have to be very, very thoughtful and explicit about the new contract. chang: right. and i feel we can all learn so much from that kind of communicativeness. guralnik: yeah. chang: your show also reminds me   we bring so much of our own past into relationships and so much about what makes a relationship work is learning how to work with your partner's past as you're working... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...on how to deal with your own past, right? and there is another... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...couple on this season, casimar and alexes, who are deeply in love, yet they both have suffered trauma. and sometimes the two of them have these explosive fights that leave casimar wondering how to love someone like alexes. guralnik: yeah. (soundbite of tv show, "couples therapy") casimar: i'm in the corner. i'm sitting in the bathroom cowering. and i'm like, just walk away, please. how much more understanding am i supposed to be? when does this cross the line of, like, you're being a survivor and this being a traumatic episode and this just being abusive? chang: i was so drawn to this couple... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...and that particular piece of tape that we just heard. it made me want to ask you directly that question. how would you answer that? at what point is being supportive to someone you love harmful to you? guralnik: i mean, it's a profound question. i don't have, like, a pat answer. it really varies from person to person, from couple to couple. i can say about casimar and alexes, there was never a moment there that i thought, oh, this is going too far, or now we're going into, like, very destructive terrain. it was always couched in so much mutual care. but, you know, when you carry a history of trauma, it doesn't just vanish. it shows up in later intimate relationships, and it's a chance to really work things through. but it's going to be hard. it's going to take everything you've got. chang: well, you know, as we were preparing for this interview, a colleague of mine shared that watching your show was instructive for him in his own decision to break up with a longtime boyfriend. and i'm wondering how you feel about your relationship with viewers. these are people you are not talking directly to, but who are learning from you and from your clients and who are changing their own behaviors and making decisions about their own lives because of what you and your clients talk about. what do you think about your own relationship with viewers? guralnik: i feel super, super responsible. i think that's been, like, the biggest honor and privilege and the biggest burden of doing this show, which is that i feel, like, a great deal of responsibility. we take that very, very seriously, like, what message are we putting out there to make sure we're really pushing it in the direction that we ethically and morally and psychologically believe in. i take it really, really seriously. i mean it's an honor and a very big responsibility. chang: therapist orna guralnik stars in the showtime series "couples therapy." season 4 is out now. thank you so much, orna, for spending this time with us. guralnik: thank you, ailsa. (soundbite of music) transcript provided by npr, copyright npr. npr transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an npr contractor. this text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. accuracy and availability may vary. the authoritative record of npr’s programming is the audio record.

shows such as couples therapy are primarily entertainment, but they also can get you to start thinking like a psychologist. i watched the entirety of couples therapy from my childhood bedroom while visiting my parents in july. it was as apt a time and place as any for entertaining some heavy psychoanalytic ideas that would, no doubt, cause me to reflect on my life. the showtime docuseries follows orna guralnik, a real life psychologist in new york, as she works with couples over the course of several months. deep into the second season, guralnik challenges one woman to consider that the bursts of anger she feels toward her husband aren’t actually about him, but are instead motivated by anxiety inherited from a demanding mother who considered herself a failure. “anxiety tells you something about your parents’ unhappiness, and your being recruited to do something about it,” guralnik tells the woman. at this point, i had to close my laptop and stare at the wall for a few minutes. had i been running emotional errands for the two people down the hall without realizing? i wasn’t sure whether it was wise, or fair to my parents, to apply what guralnik had said to my own life, but i had some ideas about how i might do so. couples therapy makes for good tv: the couples come off as vivid and earnest, but there’s still lots of drama, if not quite the over the top kind you can find on reality shows like the bachelor and real housewives. they point fingers, reach stalemates, and struggle to see how past trauma has shaped the way they treat their partners. with time, some of them do make progress, coming to understand their role in negative relationship dynamics and learning to take a more empathetic view of their partner. the show belongs to a budding genre let’s call it “therapy voyeurism” in which real counseling sessions are recorded and packaged for mass consumption: in addition to couples therapy, there’s viceland’s the therapist and esther perel’s couples therapy podcast, where should we begin?, both of which debuted in 2017. (the former lasted one season, while the fourth season of perel’s podcast came out last year.) my own experience watching couples therapy led me to wonder whether therapy voyeurism can be more than just entertainment. right now, people would have good reason to turn to these shows as a stand in for or supplement to actual therapy. the pandemic has ushered in a profound mental health crisis, and although many people were kept out of therapy in normal times because of a lack of time and money, even those who are actively pursuing treatment now have been stymied by a shortage of therapists with openings in their schedules. coincidentally or not, a showtime spokesperson said that streaming viewership of couples therapy had doubled from its debut season, in 2019, to its second season, which came out in april. i reached out to some psychologists to get their take on the phenomenon, and they were very clear: therapy voyeurism is not real therapy but that doesn’t mean it’s totally pointless either. esther perel: why happy people cheat in all likelihood, viewers won’t walk away from an episode (or even a season) of couples therapy with a how to guide for managing their anxiety, lifting their depression, and solving their relationship problems. but in the most basic sense, watching guralnik guide couples toward the root of their conflict through a combination of questions and observations can give you a better understanding of how to work through your feelings. this, says steven tuber, a professor of clinical psychology at the city college of new york, isn’t so different from the outcome of actual therapy, in which psychologists are generally less keen on telling their patients exactly how to handle a situation than giving them a new way to think about their problems. “if you give a person a fancy interpretation, they’ll feel a lot better that day,” he told me. “but if you teach them to think psychologically, they can do that for a lifetime.” guralnik certainly got in my head. after watching the show, i found myself considering my own role in perpetuating certain dynamics in my relationship, rather than assuming that they begin and end with my boyfriend. i became more open to the possibility that my negative reaction to something he does might have more to do with my existing anxieties than his inherent wrongness. (though, sometimes, yes, he’s dead wrong.) reckoning with these ideas didn’t make me feel like i was uniquely bad at relationships after all, i’d just watched several other people do the same. another potential benefit of therapy voyeurism, tuber said, is that these shows could encourage people to seek out a therapist by showing them what treatment actually looks like. (assuming, of course, that they can get an appointment in the pandemic rush for mental health support.) while the stigma around therapy has diminished over time, it remains a significant barrier for many people who could benefit from getting help. “if [the psychologist] comes off as thoughtful and multidimensional, it will make it easier for people on the fence to say, ‘this isn’t so scary, i’m going to look into this,’” he said. people who are already in therapy stand to gain something too: they can see how they respond to different approaches, making them more informed consumers and potentially compelling them to find a therapist who better fits what they’re looking for. read: the curious comforts of a youtube show about group therapy last month, i reached guralnik over zoom, and she confirmed that i’m not alone in using couples therapy as a lens through which to look at my own life. (her dog, nico, an alaskan klee kai and a delightful presence on the show, was asleep on the couch behind her.) “people typically watch the show with other people,” she said. parents and children, romantic partners, and friends tune in together, and they’ll hit pause throughout to discuss their own relationships. “they’ll say, ‘oh, he reminds me of you,’ or ‘he reminds me of me,’” guralnik said. “we didn’t know that was going to happen.” guralnik doesn’t see couples therapy as a replacement for, well, couples therapy. “hopefully people are not going to use the show to do that,” she said. but in her view, it can be helpful for the same reason it’s not an adequate substitute: it’s not about you. just as children’s make believe games allow them to engage with scenarios that they may encounter later in life, guralnik sees her show as a space where adults can imagine their own issues played out from a safe remove. this distance frees us up to think more creatively, come up with different solutions, and hold greater compassion for ourselves and others. but what that means is that therapy voyeurism is just one of many activities that provide us with this kind of productive distance from ourselves. in fact, they’re all around us: books, movies, games, and even sports can all serve a similar function. in a couples therapy program she teaches, the chicago psychotherapist karen bloomberg assigns alain de botton’s the course of love, a novel that tells the story of a long term romantic relationship and ends each chapter with an analysis of the couple’s dynamic. “it sounds kind of hokey, but it’s very well done,” she told me. she and her husband ended up discussing their own relationship after they’d both read it, and she recommended it to their adult children. as with therapy shows, it provides a new way of seeing your problems: “it’s not you, but it could be you, and it could hold the space until you’re ready to look at yourself in that way,” she said. read: the quick therapy that actually works none of the psychologists i talked with mentioned any major downsides of consuming therapy shows and podcasts, though it seems possible that some viewers might overextrapolate from them in the same way that webmd can spur people into thinking their minor problems are actually cancer. but the irony of therapy voyeurism is that its potential benefits may be limited by the genre’s reach. tuber said he was skeptical that therapy shows would penetrate beyond the relatively narrow slice of the population that is already open to the therapeutic process: in 2019, less than 20 percent of adults had received mental health treatment in the past year, according to the cdc, and those who did were far more likely to be white and female. “overwhelmingly, when people are struggling with issues, they talk to a family member, religious figure, or their general practitioner way before they go see a therapist,” tuber said. (guralnik said she has heard from viewers all over the world, though showtime would not provide details on the demographics of the show’s viewership.) i’d bought into the idea of therapy well before i heard about couples therapy, and the show appealed precisely because i already wanted to go deeper into that world. watching it made me feel good about myself: smarter, because i could clearly see when someone was assigning too much blame to their partner; more benevolent, and maybe a bit saintly, because i learned to empathize with those on the show who struck me as absolute villains at the outset. these lessons, if not the self aggrandizement, were a good thing, and they were largely possible because of the neutrality and emotional buffer i was afforded as an outside observer. but while that buffer can be useful, it has to come down if you want to truly dig into your own psyche. unfortunately, bingeing a show has not fixed all the problems in my life. “we talk a lot about ‘bringing something into the room.’ what that means is really experiencing the vulnerability right there, in the moment, with the therapist,” bloomberg said. “that’s what doesn’t happen when you’re watching.” more stories office holiday parties really might never be the same

by michael levitt , katia riddle , ailsa chang npr's ailsa chang speaks with therapist orna gurlanik, star of the documentary series "couples therapy." the show is challenging the idea that couples therapy is a last ditch effort for people. ailsa chang, host: we often think of couples therapy as some last ditch effort that people make when they're pretty much ready to break up, right? well, one documentary series is challenging that idea by following the experiences of couples who are in therapy at different stages of their relationships. across nine episodes, viewers have a rare look into real life therapy sessions, deeply intimate conversations that are normally intensely private. (soundbite of montage) unidentified person #1: we crossed boundaries that shouldn't have been crossed. unidentified person #2: the yelling, the drinking, it feels helpless. unidentified person #3: why are you bringing that up again? unidentified person #4: because it happened. unidentified person #5: it's just embarrassing. unidentified person #6: i'm having a hard time (ph). unidentified person #7: it stabs me. unidentified person #8: it's not about you. unidentified person #9: i just feel blindsided. unidentified person #10: put in the effort. unidentified person #11: how are you not understanding? (crosstalk) unidentified person #12: enough. chang: this show, called "couples therapy," is now in its fourth season on showtime. and it revolves around one psychotherapist, orna guralnik, who joins us now. welcome. orna guralnik: thank you. thank you, ailsa. chang: oh, well, thank you. i am a huge fan of participating in couple's therapy. i've done it in multiple relationships, so there's a lot in these episodes that resonates with me except for the fact that i don't think i could ever do therapy on tv. like, i could never put such intimate moments out there for the world to see. and i guess that's my first question for you, orna, as a therapist   why? like, tell me what excites you, what is compelling for you about making public something that is usually so intensely private. guralnik: i know. and the frame of confidentiality is usually sort of our first rule, right? chang: right. guralnik: we   this is, like, the thing we respect the most. i know. i felt the same way when i first heard about this idea. but what excites me the most about what the show has been able to accomplish is that it manages to offer something to people that otherwise wouldn't have access   wouldn't have access to therapy, wouldn't have access to how other people work through their issues as   relationship issues always emerge. there's a lot of really vital information that i think the series offers. chang: how do you think the interactions change because everyone participating knows there is an audience present, a huge audience? guralnik: shockingly, in a fundamental way, nothing changes. there's something essential about the work that doesn't change at all, no matter the cameras. i mean, not that the cameras are in the room. you don't really see the cameras, but people know they're being filmed. chang: yeah. guralnik: and still, the work is the work is the work. chang: that's so interesting. you don't think it's more performative because people know they're being made into a tv show. guralnik: you'd think so. i would think so, too. chang: but it's not. guralnik: but i can tell you just even from my own subjective experience that all of that kind of drops away. but there is something about knowing that it's being recorded and that may be aired and   that it intensifies the work a lot. it's almost like therapy on steroids. so it happens faster. chang: well, you know, as we mentioned, this is the fourth season. the show is called "couples therapy." but what's new about this season is we encounter the show's first polyamorous relationship, a group of three people. and i was curious watching you working with them, are there universal lessons that we can learn from this group even though they don't represent a, quote, "typical relationship"? guralnik: what's interesting to me about working with, like, nontraditional structures is that the ingredients of a relationship don't change. it's more like the weights of what do people prioritize and what do they move to the background. so in the case of polycules or people in polyamorous relationships, there's a great deal of emphasis on verbalizing things... chang: yes. guralnik: ...on keeping things very explicit. chang: i was so struck by how explicit the understandings were, at least how... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...explicit they wanted the understandings between them to be. there was almost this... guralnik: they have to. chang: ...contract that they were trying to draft among the three of them. guralnik: well, there's always a contract. in every relationship, there's a contract, whether it's explicit or implicit, or it's passed down from, like, tradition. what happens with, like, nontraditional structures or with polycules is they have to   since they're kind of throwing away some of the old contract, they have to reiterate a new version of the contract. chang: yes. guralnik: and they're figuring it out as they go 'cause they're not relying on tradition. so they have to be very, very thoughtful and explicit about the new contract. chang: right. and i feel we can all learn so much from that kind of communicativeness. guralnik: yeah. chang: your show also reminds me   we bring so much of our own past into relationships and so much about what makes a relationship work is learning how to work with your partner's past as you're working... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...on how to deal with your own past, right? and there is another... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...couple on this season, casimar and alexes, who are deeply in love, yet they both have suffered trauma. and sometimes the two of them have these explosive fights that leave casimar wondering how to love someone like alexes. guralnik: yeah. (soundbite of tv show, "couples therapy") casimar: i'm in the corner. i'm sitting in the bathroom cowering. and i'm like, just walk away, please. how much more understanding am i supposed to be? when does this cross the line of, like, you're being a survivor and this being a traumatic episode and this just being abusive? chang: i was so drawn to this couple... guralnik: yeah. chang: ...and that particular piece of tape that we just heard. it made me want to ask you directly that question. how would you answer that? at what point is being supportive to someone you love harmful to you? guralnik: i mean, it's a profound question. i don't have, like, a pat answer. it really varies from person to person, from couple to couple. i can say about casimar and alexes, there was never a moment there that i thought, oh, this is going too far, or now we're going into, like, very destructive terrain. it was always couched in so much mutual care. but, you know, when you carry a history of trauma, it doesn't just vanish. it shows up in later intimate relationships, and it's a chance to really work things through. but it's going to be hard. it's going to take everything you've got. chang: well, you know, as we were preparing for this interview, a colleague of mine shared that watching your show was instructive for him in his own decision to break up with a longtime boyfriend. and i'm wondering how you feel about your relationship with viewers. these are people you are not talking directly to, but who are learning from you and from your clients and who are changing their own behaviors and making decisions about their own lives because of what you and your clients talk about. what do you think about your own relationship with viewers? guralnik: i feel super, super responsible. i think that's been, like, the biggest honor and privilege and the biggest burden of doing this show, which is that i feel, like, a great deal of responsibility. we take that very, very seriously, like, what message are we putting out there to make sure we're really pushing it in the direction that we ethically and morally and psychologically believe in. i take it really, really seriously. i mean it's an honor and a very big responsibility. chang: therapist orna guralnik stars in the showtime series "couples therapy." season 4 is out now. thank you so much, orna, for spending this time with us. guralnik: thank you, ailsa. (soundbite of music) copyright © 2024 npr. all rights reserved. visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. npr transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an npr contractor. this text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. accuracy and availability may vary. the authoritative record of npr’s programming is the audio record. sponsor message become an npr sponsor

when news breaks, you need to understand what matters   and what to do about it. at vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. but we can’t do it on our own. we rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. will you support our work and become a vox member today? showtime’s couples therapy resonated deeply with me. and when i talked to its main therapist, i realized why. by emily st. james when my wife and i arrived to our joint interview with therapist dr. orna guralnik, i walked in with an agenda: i wanted her to start interviewing us. that’s not how interviews like this usually work. usually, the journalist asks the questions and the subject answers. it’s how that relationship is “supposed” to go. my wife and i are both journalists. she’s libby hill, tv awards editor for indiewire, and the two of us   as the first couple of tv criticism   thought it would be cute if we interviewed guralnik together. (libby’s piece will run later in the year.) guralnik is a licensed therapist and the “star” of showtime’s riveting documentary series couples therapy, one of my favorite new shows of last year (it was recently renewed for season two). and i’ve been in enough therapy   and enough couples therapy   to know that the therapist patient relationship isn’t so different from the journalist subject relationship. it’s also driven by questions and answers, by careful listening to what someone is saying, by actively pushing back against ideas that don’t quite hold together. and couples therapy captures the drip drip drip erosion of self justification that sits at the core of good therapy as well as any film or tv show i’ve seen. working with four couples, guralnik zeroes in on what’s broken in their relationships, from seemingly minor issues (a slight difference in timing on when a couple wants to have kids) to potentially marriage ending ones (infidelity). she aims to treat all three people in each of these relationships: the two partners, and then the third, separate person they form between them, a ghost in the room who’s always there. but guralnik herself remains almost a cipher on the show. we know as little about her as i know about my own couples counselor, who once showed up for a session with my wife and me wearing a medical boot. she had injured herself playing soccer, and that is basically everything i have ever learned about her personal life: she once injured her foot playing soccer. so i knew guralnik probably wasn’t going to tell us much about herself. she’s too much of a professional. but i wanted her to ask us questions, because i wanted her to tell us something not just about marriage in general but about our marriage. it’s been through a lot lately, and i wouldn’t mind a little clarity. as it turns out, we got there eventually. but first, we talked about therapy and television   and how they’re really not that different in the end. my wife and i interviewed guralnik last october. when we met up with her, i probably shouldn’t have been surprised that her real office looked nothing at all like her tv office, which is the kind of simultaneously tiny and vast space that tv series are so often set in. (her tv office is a fully fabricated set, something i probably should have guessed.) on tv, her fake office is lit so that it feels much more stage like and dreamy. if it has walls, they’re suggested but not shown. this is all part of the sleight of hand of couples therapy. early in our chat with her, guralnik corrected herself to say that the people she meets with on the series are not “patients” but “participants,” because whatever rules might exist around confidentiality and the therapeutic process become moot the minute you put cameras in a therapist’s office. everybody involved in the show knew they were going to be on television, which is perhaps not conducive to the kind of soul prying work therapy often requires. “it’s a very ethical profession. you take on responsibility for other people, and there are a lot of things that are set as parameters to keep the space safe   to know what are the limits of how much contact you have, how much they know about you,” guralnik told us. “here we had to kind of recreate the frame. one of the first things that people asked me is, ‘what about confidentiality? how do you work without that?’ so there’s no confidentiality. it’s so bizarre.” in therapy, major revelations can take months or even years to achieve; they’re often the result of a steady accumulation that eventually overflows. so constructing a season of television around therapy is tricky. tv favors compression   moving the story along at a consistent pace and getting to the next bit. but in a therapeutic context, compression is dangerous because it threatens to turn the televised version of therapy into a constant string of unearned breakthroughs. so why take on that challenge, if you’re a serious psychoanalyst like guralnik? she said she wanted to do couples therapy for a variety of reasons, but two kept coming up throughout our conversation with her. the first was that it would allow her to spread the idea of what good therapy can do, and the second was that it offered her a chance to advance her politics. she said she believes the show’s ability to speak to those ideas might actually be enhanced by airing on television. let’s start with the idea of evangelizing for good therapy, because it’s the easiest to explain. a series like couples therapy will have a niche audience by default, but in this digital era, its afterlife will be long. so a fairly rigorous presentation of talk therapy might create a better understanding of the process than any number of scenes in sitcoms or new yorker cartoons where someone lies down on a couch and a man with a beard says, “tell me about your mother.” “we’re sketching a therapeutic process,” guralnik said. “there are certain ingredients that are not there, but other ingredients are there instead. so the confidentiality is suddenly taken out, in both directions. right? they get to see my conversations with [her colleague] virginia. the work is documented and recorded by a crew. you sacrifice confidentiality, but you get something that’s actually pretty amazing, which is that the people who are participating feel deeply held, respected, what they’re doing really matters and matters now. and there’s evidence that they did it. it gave the work heft.” guralnik argued to us that what she does is essentially what a good documentarian does, because both are practicing the art of listening. “as a psychoanalyst, you’re listening to material, and you’re waiting for the unconscious to sort of show itself through the surface. you’re waiting for a certain kind of story to come out,” guralnik said. “the documentarian does the same thing. they have a camera, but it’s not a neutral camera. it’s a camera that’s kind of listening, listening, listening. what is the true story here? “that’s where [the listener’s] politics come in, because how are you listening?” she continued. “are you listening to try to prove a point of, you know, good guys, bad guys? what’s the truth here as far as the unconscious narrative? it’s listening to the unconscious woven in together with your politics and your ethics and your philosophy of what makes a person human.” guralnik’s trickier to explain motivation for doing couples therapy stems from how she thinks of the show as speaking to some political project. and the reason it’s tricky is that the first thing many people will think of when they hear the word “political” is probably congress or donald trump or nancy pelosi   not the process of talk therapy. guralnik pointed to how the casting of couples therapy’s first season was refreshingly diverse, keeping in mind racial diversity, class diversity, and lgbtq representation. that’s true: one of the couples is a cis woman married to a trans woman, and they’re navigating the process of having children. other participants are people of color. among couples therapy’s core ideas is that everybody in a committed relationship experiences the kinds of issues being discussed on the series   regardless of their other circumstances. “even if your politics were bigoted, you could not not identify with every person on this show,” guralnik said. “i don’t care what people’s politics are. in experiencing the show, they can’t ‘other.’ they can’t break people down into ‘like me’ or ‘other than me,’ or ‘i could never be that’ or ‘i could never feel that.’ the people are so honest, you have to empathize with them and identify.” is guralnik right? i’d like to think so   because wouldn’t it be wonderful if we lived in a world where couples therapy became the no. 1 show on television and changed the course of human history? but i have my doubts. couples therapy works for me, but it’s difficult to imagine it having the same effect on everyone, because no two people ever have the same experience with any one piece of art. yet guralnik’s argument that couples therapy is a political show goes beyond its diversity. she pointed out that the series was created by eli b. despres, josh kriegman, and elyse steinberg, the filmmakers behind the critically acclaimed political documentary weiner, about the rise and fall of anthony weiner. that film was about the difficult to understand psyche of one specific person. and if understanding other people is key to both therapy and art, then maybe the best way to understand politics   at both the personal and national level   is through therapy and art, too. the project of both therapy and guralnik’s progressive politics is to expand the circle of who we consider human. consider the lesbian couple from couples therapy. on some level, their story is just, “we want to have a baby,” which is one of the oldest desires humans have. but because of who they are, this very human desire is framed from a radically different perspective. the politics of the show aren’t about donald trump. they’re not about the immediate reality of 2019 america. they’re about creating a world where we all know enough about ourselves to better understand other people   to create a world where politics, like therapy and art, is driven by building empathy for someone other than yourself. indeed, guralnik talked about the idea of politics being about feeding psychological appetites we might barely understand, the way trump’s narcissistic moments are red meat for some of the people in his fan base, who long to feel as important as trump portrays himself. but guralnik suggested that a show like couples therapy might actually find a way to subvert that narcissism   if not in the president, then in some of the rest of us. “the fact that when one person is talking, the camera is often focusing on the other person, that’s a political move,” guralnik said. “it’s not about narcissism, it’s not about the person speaking, it’s about, it’s a relationship. you’re speaking, you’re having an impact. but that’s a political move.” and right after she said that was when   completely out of nowhere and with about 10 minutes left in our allotted interview time slot   she asked my wife and me about us and about how it had affected our marriage to go from seeming like just another heterosexual couple to being a trans woman and a cis woman in love, navigating a country not always enthralled by our very existence. late in slave play, jeremy o. harris’s new play about a deeply unconventional couples therapy program that tries to heal relationships between black and white people by having them role play pre civil war scenarios involving slavery, one character has a realization that drives much of the rest of the play’s action. he might be a black man, but when he gets close enough to a white person (like his white female lover, for instance), his race evaporates from the conversation. his lover might try to see him as just a person, not as a black person. and that makes him feel alienated from himself. the play inspired an uncomfortable resonance with my own life and my marriage since i came out as trans. i am white and couldn’t relate directly to the racial aspects of the story. but i could relate to the idea that every monogamous relationship is between two people, and within that space, those two people try to see the best in each other. every monogamous relationship is inevitably built atop systems that perpetuate brutal inequalities. because those inequalities are so huge, we often pretend we don’t have to grapple with those inequalities, that love can conquer all. and i honestly believe it can. but also: can it? libby and i have been married for 16 years. we got married before we even finished college, because everybody we knew thought maybe it would be a good idea, and we didn’t see a compelling reason not to. it ended up being a bad idea, even though we’ve stayed together. we weren’t yet adults. one of us was clearing out a brain hampered by depression. the other wasn’t yet the person she needed to be. we grew together, but codependently. we’ve navigated life together extremely well   libby is my favorite person alive and the first person i want to tell about my day   but part of understanding each other means she sees me as a woman named emily and not, specifically, as a trans woman, moving through a deeply transphobic society. and i see her as libby, not as a person struggling with depression and anxiety in a world weighted toward the neurotypical. the moment when guralnik zeroed in on this quality in our relationship and started asking us questions was so fleeting that i didn’t realize what had happened until i read the interview transcript. libby and i were talking to guralnik about the idea of paying attention to the person who isn’t speaking. much of our society is predisposed to pay attention to the speaker when it should be paying attention to the listener, and directing our attention to the listener is the work of more progressive politics. who is being affected by what is being said? what actions must be taken to give them a voice? the three of us began discussing guralnik’s notion of a third, imaginary person   a phantom between two people who is, in essence, their relationship. libby, jokingly, said that when i came out, i “murdered” that third person, that intensely codependent phantom. she didn’t mean that i murdered myself, in the sense of the problematic trope that people who transition are literally dead and must be grieved. she meant, instead, that my transition completely altered this third person, this specter. and we’re still figuring out the exact makeup of this new ghost. but guralnik seized on the word “murdered” and kept inviting us to explore what libby could have meant by using that word, even though the two of us didn’t quite know what guralnik was doing. reading the transcript later was a jarring experience   it was so easy to see how the two of us kept being flippant and self deprecating about that word “murdered,” only for guralnik to challenge us to confront and articulate what we were thinking and feeling. that part of the conversation lasted for about five minutes, but it was surreal to revisit it and realize that guralnik pushed us deeper and deeper, and we almost didn’t notice. later we returned to the topic of couples therapy, and i asked her what advice she’d have for every couple out there. she offered: “take your own stories, your own narrative about what’s going on with a grain of salt. don’t get too excited about your own story and your own narrative. get curious about another person’s perspective.” i realized while writing this piece that part of whatever frictions exist between libby and me since i came out has emerged from our assumptions about what’s going on in each other’s narrative. i want her to see how much more vibrant and alive i am since coming out, but also how much more terrified i am of a world that offers plenty of reasons to be terrified. i want her to see me as both a woman and a trans woman. i want her to see how hard it is for me to talk to my parents now, and how destabilizing it is when someone introduces me on their radio show by saying i “used to be” someone else. she wants me to see everything about her that is darker and stickier and more complicated. she wants me to see how hard it is to get out of bed in the morning, how difficult it is to just be alive some days. we each want the other to see not just the best in us but also the mess we stand upon. we don’t want our hardships erased by the cleansing power of love, even though we also require the beautiful acceptance that comes when love conquers all. and in the midst of that, our new third person   that less codependent baby ghost who so desperately needs care and feeding to grow into its best self   is sometimes left to languish. it is so easy to inadvertently convince ourselves that other people mostly exist as supporting characters in a story we are telling. but the real story, in life and on television, lies somewhere in between. the real story is the relationship, the person that exists between people, who is at once unreal and the most real thing any of us can possibly imagine. creating a world where we pay attention to the health of the other selves formed among any congregation of people, be it through marriage or work or country, is the work of guralnik’s practice, her tv show, and her politics. the ending of slave play isn’t hopeful, but it’s also not as full of despair as it could be. two of its characters realize that understanding the problems within a marriage requires finding a language for those problems, and admitting they exist outside of their love for each other. since i came out, attending regular couples therapy has gotten harder, rather than easier, for libby and me. our problems sometimes exist outside of our love. but understanding that idea has opened up a world we didn’t dare acknowledge before we walked into the interview with orna guralnik. something changed between us, and in trying to carry on as if it hadn’t, we only made things worse. now, we see the pieces of ourselves and our marriage more clearly. we see how they might fit together again. couples therapy is available on showtime’s streaming services. understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. kanye west is dining with white supremacists and openly praising hitler. how did we get here? how to save without sacrificing your favorite snacks. use this article … 95 years after i’m dead. why hasn’t anyone told america’s youngest adults about drinking etiquette? the traitors’s third season is very good because its traitors are very bad. karla sofía gascón made history as an openly trans oscar nominee. now she’s apologizing for hateful posts. © 2025 vox media, llc. all rights reserved

in this oversharing, overshared age, the psychotherapist’s consulting room may be one of the last purely private sanctums left. sessions happen behind firmly closed doors, the sound of patients’ voices masked by the whirr of white noise machines. the promise of confidentiality is sacred. what happens in treatment is meant to stay there. a few years ago, though, the documentary filmmakers josh kriegman and elyse steinberg decided that it might be worth trying to peek under the freudian slip. kriegman and steinberg both grew up in upper middle class jewish families on the east coast, a milieu that does not so much condone therapy as consider it a part of functional adult life, as routine as filing your taxes or brushing your teeth. steinberg’s father in law is a therapist, as are both of kriegman’s parents. “i was visiting home, and my father busted out of his office, kind of freaking out about this session he had just been through with a couple,” kriegman recalled recently. “he said that it would be not only incredibly captivating to watch but meaningful to share what it looks like for people to engage in this way to go from speaking to each other in cold fury to rage, to tears, to ultimately ending up hugging and reconciling.” kriegman and steinberg had experience getting subjects to bare uncomfortably intimate details of their personal lives on camera. their first project together, edited and co written by their creative partner, eli despres, was “weiner” (2016), a fly on the wall documentary that followed anthony weiner’s disastrous campaign for mayor of new york in 2013 and the simultaneous implosion of his marriage to huma abedin. this time, the three filmmakers had in mind something more salutary. they began to devise a concept for a television show. they would put real couples in a consulting room with a real therapist. cameras would roll. whatever happened would happen. the trick was finding the right person to build the show around: someone who possessed both sterling professional credentials and a magnetic, binge worthy charisma. they began to interview possible candidates, hundreds of them. “if i saw you on the street, i’d be, like, ‘who’s your therapist? do you like her?’ ” steinberg said. some seemed eager to embrace the limelight, but most therapists don’t go into the business dreaming of pop culture celebrity. among the professionals the team approached was virginia goldner, a widely admired psychoanalyst who has written papers with titles like “romantic bonds, binds, and ruptures” and “when love hurts.” “i wouldn’t do it in a million years,” goldner said. “i was thinking, oh, my god, who would ?” to the israeli american therapist orna guralnik, the thought didn’t sound so crazy. her career had already taken some unusual turns. in the early two thousands, after getting a degree in clinical psychology, she had co founded a consulting firm, providing psychological insight for companies like dell, xerox, and goldman sachs. when she could no longer avoid the nagging sense that she was using her expertise not to improve lives but to help keep exploited workers productive, she decided to train as a psychoanalyst, a pursuit that took a decade. as an undergraduate in tel aviv, she had studied filmmaking; the prospect of cameras didn’t faze her. plus, her daughter was about to go to college, and she had a feeling that she’d need something to take her mind off her semi empty nest. she responded to an ad that the filmmakers had distributed at the n.y.u. postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, where she now teaches, thinking that she might consult on the project. the filmmakers had a different idea. “it’s kind of like when you meet your partner you know right away,” steinberg said. “i knew right away when i spoke to orna.” guralnik is fifty eight, with olive skin and dark hair. she has great glasses, a forearm tattoo, and the casual poise of the dancer that, as a teen ager, she considered becoming. since 2019, she has starred on the showtime series “couples therapy,” the fruit of kriegman, steinberg, and despres’s labors. each season of the show features a handful of couples as they are given fifteen to twenty sessions’ worth of treatment, a process that unfolds over weeks and is then edited into nine half hour episodes, creating a patchwork portrait of love in distress. the format has proved a hit; the show’s third season just premièred, and production has already begun on the next batch of episodes. the chance to gawk at the splayed viscera of other people’s lives would surely attract viewers no matter who occupied the therapist’s chair. but guralnik makes the show. “she’s like the napoleon of human emotion,” despres told me able to rapidly discern the reasons for a couple’s stalemate and devise a plan of attack before viewers, or the patients themselves, have any read on what might be going on. guralnik speaks in a gently accented murmur, but there’s a hint of the hawk in her gaze; with her chin tilted sharply down and her brows knitted, her eyes seem to bore into her patients’ very souls. “if you’re ever in the presence of an élite athlete, you notice that they have a physicality that’s kind of overwhelming,” despres said. “i have that response to orna. the focus of her attention is really quite intense.” “couples therapy” has turned guralnik into that rare thing: a famous analyst. her closest peer in this regard is esther perel, the belgian born psychotherapist who pioneered the couples therapy vérité genre with her podcast “where should we begin?” perel, something of a self marketing maven, has two best selling books, a viral ted talk, and even a mildly erotic card game (“where should we begin? a game of stories”) to her name. guralnik, by contrast, has no tie ins, no merch, no catchphrase at least, not yet. her popular reputation rests entirely on what “couples therapy” reveals of her frank, probing clinical style, which involves nudging patients to the edge of a terrifying emotional precipice, then encouraging them to jump. “one of the graceful things about orna’s work is that she slides you into the setting in a warm and casual way,” goldner told me. goldner, who is also on the faculty at n.y.u., is one of guralnik’s closest mentors, and guralnik eventually persuaded her to come on the show in the role of clinical adviser the “all knower,” goldner joked with whom guralnik refines her approach to patients’ dilemmas. it was guralnik’s idea to make supervision, as the practice is known in psychoanalysis, central to the show. her authority rests, in part, on her willingness to admit what she doesn’t know. in the show’s new season, guralnik is stumped by a couple named ping and will. (despite its commitment to radical exposure, “couples therapy” doesn’t divulge its subjects’ last names.) when they got together, seven years ago, they shared a desire for exclusive emotional commitment, but happily included other people in their sex life. then ping began to see a lover on her own, and will panicked. he drew up a set of rules to govern ping’s trysts: no long walks, no cuddling. but sex severed from flirting, from intimacy, wasn’t sexy to ping. soon, will, too, started to date other people, and ping found herself mobbed by the same anxieties that had tormented will. “i feel fucking left out,” she tells guralnik, at their first session. that, guralnik learns, is hardly the problem’s extent. ping is mean to will. she derides and belittles him. will, big and boyish, cries easily, and when he says something particularly heartfelt that nothing he does seems good enough for ping, that she refuses the affection he proffers guralnik asks ping what she hears. “honestly,” ping answers, “just a whole lot of whining.” guralnik, troubled, visits goldner at her apartment, where, surrounded by her impressive collection of african statuary, they discuss the couple’s deadlock. there is something sadomasochistic in it, guralnik feels. “i’m finding that my regular toolbox is not totally relevant,” she says. she wants to address the problem, but “i have to listen in as to when the timing is right.” at their next session, will confesses that he feels hopeless. “we’ve been to so many therapists, and it’s just going through the same thing again and again,” he says, in a choked voice. “where are you?” guralnik asks ping. “i’m trying not to come up with a snide remark,” ping says. “but you have an impulse to do that?” link copied “i do. i feel there’s a lot of ‘he said, she said,’ right?” ping says. “but what’s missing is ” “is some kind of theory that will help you understand ‘what’s the dynamic?’ ” guralnik breaks in. “yeah, exactly,” ping says. guralnik seizes her moment. “so one of the things we’ve talked about is you’re already deeply stuck in the groove where you’ll start with an assault,” she begins. “now, we know already that underneath the assault there’s all sorts of feelings of hurt, vulnerability, betrayal.” she turns to will. “and your response to that is to enter some state of helplessness, and trying to comply, trying to appease, but really you’re retreating.” will makes a noise of assent. “which leaves you further abandoned,” guralnik tells ping. “so that’s your dance at the moment. and you’re exhausted by it. but something’s keeping you together.” “i don’t know what!” ping says. “this is what i keep digging for.” guralnik lays out the options: “you can tell me that you’re tired of it, you want to break up. we can try to understand how each of you got so deep into this particular position. i’d want to hear something about your family histories.” “i feel like everyone always wants to talk about my family,” will sighs. he doesn’t have a good relationship with them, but he’s made his peace with it. fine, guralnik says. but “you’re too good at this role for it not to be well rehearsed.” looking at the past might help them understand why they’re so stuck in the present. “is that of interest to you?” there’s a pause. even ping is quiet. here is the cliff. will they leap? “o.k.,” will says. “so where do we start?” early on a rainy morning in march, i went to visit guralnik at her duplex apartment, which occupies the garden level and parlor floors of a brownstone in park slope. the show had already given me a tantalizing glimpse inside; when the pandemic disrupted the filming of the second season, guralnik, like therapists the world over, took to zoom, and the cameras followed her as she conducted sessions from home, occasionally stopping to ask her preteen son, jasper, to hush. watching guralnik as she peered at her laptop in front of a handsomely loaded bookcase, i had concluded that she was working from a luxurious home office, some hallowed room of her own. projection! what i had taken for a desk was in fact one end of the dining room table, fully exposed to the domestic elements. “it’s complete public space,” guralnik told me as she fired up the espresso machine. “i was shutting my son into his room. my daughter and her boyfriend were living here, so they had to go upstairs to another apartment to work.” now the mood was calm. guralnik shuffled around in red felt slippers. her dog, nico, a gregarious klee kai named for the velvet underground singer, sprawled on the floor, diligently chewing an action figure. guralnik has lived in the apartment for sixteen years “the longest i’ve lived anywhere” and it has acquired the rich patina of family life. board games were piled next to the fireplace, shoes strewn about the entryway. propped in front of the tv was a cubist inflected portrait by an artist friend who’s also an analyst, showing guralnik in a white hoodie, an enigmatic look on her angled face. during her foray into consulting, guralnik made the kind of money that does not generally come to mental health professionals, even those who charge heftily by the hour. she owns the whole building; the film director darius marder, a friend of hers, lives on the top floor, and she rents the other two apartments to israeli musicians, the kids of her best friends from home. “no one locks their doors,” she told me. “i have a little kibbutz in the house.” psychoanalysts generally keep their personal lives hidden from patients, the better to encourage transference: the phenomenon, described by freud, in which a patient directs the intense feelings generated by a formative relationship onto the blank slate of a therapist. even before the pandemic, guralnik had made the surprising decision to allow cameras to follow her outside the consulting room, as she took walks with nico, or headed into the subway, coffee in hand. then covid struck, and there she was, serving her kids breakfast and kissing them on the top of the head. was there a partner in the mix? if so, such a person was kept out of sight. when guralnik and i first met, i asked if she would discuss her own romantic life on the record. she declined, reconsidered, then declined again. “it’s a little tedious for me, but it’s just not right for my patients,” she said, meaning not only those on the show but the ones she sees in private practice. “there’s so much that people gain from being able to not know about me, or from being able to imagine me as one way or another. am i a conservative straight person? am i gay? am i queer? the moment i start talking about myself, i’m robbing them of all that.” we moved to the living room, where guralnik settled into a swivel chair big enough for two. i wanted to know about couples. why do humans persist in pairing off, even though doing so often causes terrible pain? guralnik herself has voiced skepticism on the subject. in the show’s first episode, she confessed to goldner that she was kept up at night by the pressure to repair her patients’ relationships, when she saw all too clearly the limits of what one could deliver. now she talked about the species level imperative to reproduce and protect the young, about the economic and ideological pressure from the state. the word “neoliberalism” made an appearance. outside the consulting room, guralnik can have a sardonic edge, a matter of fact briskness. “i’m not stupid,” she said. “i know the cost of it for people. if it’s not working, get out.” but that was only part of the story. for all her tart realism, guralnik is a romantic. “falling in love, being in love, learning how to love better and bigger with more responsibilities is an amazing thing,” she said. those transformative possibilities give her faith that coupledom can not only restrict and derail lives but radically expand them. “i’m biased,” she said, “but i think people need me to be.” guralnik is a proponent of systems theory, an approach to psychology that looks both at a person’s interior world and at the way interpersonal dynamics affect behavior and identity. a couple is a system. so is a family. one member might be called upon to serve as the “identified patient,” the scapegoat for all the problems; another might become the designated therapist. growing up, guralnik played the second role. her parents’ marriage was tumultuous, and she found herself mediating between them during moments of conflict. “i was developing my analytic mind very early,” she told me. “i always joke that they were my first couple to be treated.” guralnik was born in 1964, in washington, d.c. her parents worked at the israeli embassy while pursuing their studies guralnik’s mother, nehama, in art history, and her father, daniel, in aeronautical engineering. “they were very typical ashkenazi israelis of that generation,” she said. “super secular. idealists. they believed in a certain kind of socialistic, zionistic struggle, and they bought into it very early.” when she was two years old, daniel got an offer from lockheed martin and moved the family to atlanta. “i was the only jewish kid in my class,” guralnik told me. “i remember sitting on father christmas’s lap, asking if it’s o.k. for jews to get gifts.” when guralnik was seven, her father was recruited by the israeli airline el al, and the family, which now included a younger brother, relocated to tel aviv. the result was culture shock. not long after they arrived, the yom kippur war broke out, and daniel was called up from the reserves. “the men disappeared,” guralnik said. other, more mundane changes were equally startling. the zionist collectivist ethic, defined partly in opposition to the temptations of the individualist west, still held sway in early seventies israel, and the conveniences of the american suburbs were nonexistent. israeli tv had one channel. horse drawn carts tootled around guralnik’s neighborhood, selling watermelons and ice. “you had to wait seven years until you got a phone line,” guralnik recalled. in atlanta, she had attended a private school, “very cushy.” now she was tossed into a classroom with forty kids, all running wild. “i became acquainted with the israeli way of being,” she said. “you’re with a gang of kids, all afternoon long, while the parents are at work. in a way, we were raising ourselves. it was very communal living.” as guralnik got older, she began to notice a shift within her parents’ relationship. nehama had a major career as a curator at the tel aviv museum of art, but daniel was accustomed to taking priority. the family had one car; he drove it to work. nehama started to push back. “i really watched them go through a rearrangement of a very patriarchal understanding of their marriage to a more feminist one, which was not easy,” guralnik said. “i didn’t have the language for it yet. but i could see it.” guralnik, too, began to rebel against the established order at home. when she was sixteen, her parents negotiated a truce: they would give her some space if she agreed to see a therapist. guralnik was wary. “i didn’t trust any grownup on earth,” she said. but the therapist her parents found rapidly won her over. she was cool, rolling cigarette after cigarette as her black cat wandered in and out of the consulting room. she was also an activist, “the first person to make me think about my automatic assumptions about arabs, about palestinians, about authority.” and she treated guralnik as an equal, a person worthy of respect. “people are so afraid of teen agers, of girl teen agers,” guralnik said. “she was just: ‘interesting!’ ” guralnik started to immerse herself in psychoanalytic writing: freud, winnicott, r. d. laing. still, it took time for her to realize that she might have a similar talent. she had begun to study dance with the choreographer rina schenfeld, and was serious enough to think of pursuing it. but she soon embarked on her obligatory two year army service she was assigned to intelligence work, and hated every minute of it and by the time she was done her commitment had waned. she went travelling, the twentysomething israeli’s rite of passage, then enrolled in film school, where “it turned out that i couldn’t write a fiction script for the life of me.” adrift, guralnik found her thoughts turning to her former therapist. in 1990, she moved to new york with a group of friends and enrolled in the clinical psych program at the ferkauf graduate school of psychology, at yeshiva university. in the two decades since she’d left atlanta, guralnik had lost her grasp of the nuances of american life. “we would end up every evening coming back home and discussing american culture, trying to crack the code,” she said. “if they say, ‘let’s meet for lunch,’ what do they mean? if you start a sentence with ‘no,’ the way every israeli starts a sentence, why do they get offended?” in graduate school, guralnik was working with patients suffering from severe mental illness, and learning to recognize the specific social forces that helped shape pathologies “the way that poverty and race play here, which is so different from israel.” after her consulting stint, guralnik entered the postdoc program at n.y.u. there, she gravitated to an influential group of faculty known as the “gang of four”: goldner, adrienne harris, jessica benjamin, and muriel dimen, women who had been instrumental in applying feminist theory to psychoanalysis. “people who do psychoanalysis, they’re not just interested in change,” guralnik told me. “they’re interested in meaning, and making meaning. you’re always trying to listen to what hasn’t been said.” for years, the unsaid thing, in the field itself, had been the influence that culture has on the psyche. particularly in postwar america, psychoanalysis had been hermetically focussed on the private, the interior but wasn’t the interior indelibly marked by the exterior world? members of the frankfurt school had thought so, and so did guralnik. michel foucault, louis althusser, frantz fanon, and judith butler became as important to her thinking as melanie klein and wilfred bion. in 2001, guralnik met stephen hartman, who edits the journal psychoanalytic dialogues, at a conference in miami, where he was presenting a paper on psychoanalysis and social class. hartman was a fellow dimen acolyte, and guralnik was thrilled to find someone whose interests rhymed with hers. over time, they joined up with other like minded peers to form their own gang of six, an intellectual family who now vacation together and discuss their writing in biweekly zoom sessions, and who have become part of the psychoanalytical establishment. some of them even appear on the show’s new season, as part of a diverse group of analysts who advise guralnik, giving viewers a sense of psychoanalysis as a field that looks and sounds like the world it interprets. “orna’s work has been really important for people who want to bring an awareness of the political world into the consulting room,” hartman told me. for guralnik, that awareness begins, necessarily, with herself. in a striking 2014 paper, “the dead baby,” she writes about treating a woman whose grandparents were nazis, and the “burnt landscape” that stretched between german patient and jewish analyst. on the show, guralnik interrogates what it means, as a white analyst, to treat patients of color, and to be thrown into an entirely different relation to history and power. that guralnik’s own sense of herself can change in response to who enters the room is, to her, one of the excitements of her work. “you have to account for where you’re speaking from,” she told me. guralnik’s “couples therapy” office is the platonic ideal of a therapist’s consulting room: big and airy, filled with books, stylish baubles, and moroccan inspired textiles. nico snoozes in a dog bed tucked underneath built in shelves. the walls are upholstered with an expensive looking ecru fabric. when guralnik is ready to start a session, she turns over an hourglass and ceremonially slides open the frosted glass door to the waiting room, where her patients have been marinating in front of an abstract painting that bears a notable resemblance to a rorschach blot. link copied on a recent evening, i met kriegman and steinberg in greenpoint, at the building where the show is produced. in the office, guralnik greeted us, grinning. “when i first arrived here, i was, like, ‘holy shit! they did it!’ ” she said. the show’s set designers had drawn inspiration from her actual office even the distance between her chair and the patients’ couch is the same and from mood board images that she had compiled (a lot of frank lloyd wright). but where were the cameras? in the light fixtures? hidden in a potted plant? “no one ever guesses accurately,” kriegman said. “we went through a whole bunch of different ideas for how to conceal them, and ultimately settled on kind of the oldest trick in the book.” he turned to steinberg. “outside first?” we passed through a door placed unobtrusively at the room’s far end. it took me a second to realize that what i had believed to be an ordinary office in a normal building was, in fact, a set, constructed within a vast warehouse. kriegman introduced me to a man dressed in black pants, a black hoodie, black gloves, and a black mask: a camera operator, stationed outside what i had believed to be a solid wall. now i could see that it had a wide rectangular window cut along its length. through a contrivance of angled mirrors and canny lighting, the gap is undetectable from inside the room. this brain bending optical illusion is what gives “couples therapy” its sumptuous look, with its eyeline shots and closeups that seem to capture patients’ every passing thought. dressed like ninjas, the camera operators, working mere feet away from their subjects, must act like ninjas, too: no coughing, no sneezing, no vibrating phones. guralnik’s seven fifteen session was about to start. the light filtering through the windows dimmed. (“night mode,” another illusion.) i followed kriegman and steinberg upstairs, where the rest of the show’s crew was assembled, and we put on headphones and sat in front of four monitors. on one, the couple entered the waiting room. on another, guralnik shuffled papers on her desk, took a deep breath, and moved to open the door. an hour and twenty minutes later, the three of us trooped back into the office to debrief. the session had run long, but the couple wouldn’t be on the hook for the extra time; all participants are treated gratis. “how are you feeling?” kriegman asked. “very moved,” guralnik said. the couple, who will appear on future episodes of the show, had hit upon a major breakthrough when their time was almost up. something had come undammed; the momentum of the session had surged. “i love their emotional honesty. it’s just wow.” kriegman asked me what i had thought. i had been moved as well, and also a little unnerved by my “truman show” vantage point up in the rafters. a number of former participants told me that, in the force field of guralnik’s presence, the sense of being observed simply vanished. but i had got the impression, more than once, that the couple we had just seen were speaking not just to guralnik but beyond her, to a broader audience of friends and even family members who they imagined whether anxiously or eagerly might watch the show. the relationship between the patients and the viewing public is undeniably charged. hannah zeavin, a historian and the author of “the distance cure,” a recent study of teletherapy, told me that she sees guralnik as “running and convening a kind of broadcast clinic.” stationed on our own couches in our own homes, we tune in to gain insight into our own conflicts or to project our frustrations and fantasies onto the figures exposing themselves to us. some of the show’s couples, like elaine and desean, fan favorites from the first season, take heart at the prospect of such an exchange. “aside from us being able to save our marriage, the highlight would be if we could help someone,” elaine told me. elaine is latina, and desean is black; their exploration of their respective notions of racial identity constituted a revelatory thread in their treatment. “a lot of latinos and black people, they don’t believe in therapy,” elaine said. “so it was, like, let me show you that it can help you.” the producers of “couples therapy” insist that what they have made is pure documentary, not a reality show. “it’s the ‘star trek’ prime directive: do not interfere,” despres told me. “we just happen to have set our duck blind in a place that’s rich with conflict and deep human emotion.” of course, they have handpicked the ducks, selecting for diversity of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as for the je ne sais quoi of watchability. for the most part, viewers have responded to the show’s participants with good will. but anyone who appears as himself on a television show, even one as sensitively produced as “couples therapy,” runs the risk of being flattened into a character. during one of our conversations, i asked guralnik about mau, the show’s closest thing to a villain. when he appeared on the first season with his wife, annie, mau struck viewers as arrogant, noxious, and tyrannical. (he was also charismatic and soap opera handsome, perfectly cast as a rogue.) he insisted that his needs were not merely straightforward but rational, normative. he considered sex to be a daily necessity. he had been displeased with a birthday orgy that annie had planned for him and, after annie said that he disrespected her, responded with sophistic, “i’m sorry if you feel that way” reasoning, resisting guralnik’s interventions at every turn. “i actually enjoyed working with him a lot, even though he wouldn’t enter my field,” guralnik said. “i really respected him. people became kind of obsessed with ragging on him. it was a little upsetting, actually.” annie and mau left after only eleven sessions, but the show’s viewers hadn’t finished with mau or he with them. he popped up on a reddit thread called “somebody smack mau please” to confront the haters. “i was told that the purpose of the show was to demystify and destigmatize therapy,” he wrote. “to that end the seemingly purposeful editing, omissions and cuts reflect at least to me, the desire to push a narrative.” (he has since deleted his posts.) he had been trying, he went on, “to express complex and interconnected dynamics,” looking for underlying causes rather than for superficial symptoms. “the underlying cause is you’re a dick,” one redditor responded. another diagnosed him as having narcissistic personality disorder. it was upsetting. whatever mau’s sins, people seemed to have forgotten that this was a real person, with real troubles. the audience had demanded vulnerability, growth, and a satisfying finale. when it got intransigence, out came the pitchforks. guralnik’s actual office is in a converted factory building in tribeca, in a suite shared with a trio of friends, hartman among them. in april, i met her there, after her last patient of the day had left. she had just got screeners for the new season, and would soon be heading home to watch only a few episodes for now, though her trust in the show’s producers is absolute. “how do they take what’s inside my brain the movie that’s going on in there and put it on the screen?” she marvelled. toward the end of the season, guralnik tells goldner that many of her patients are showing symptoms of “transference cure.” knowing that their time with her is nearly up, they subconsciously try to prove to themselves, and to guralnik, that they are “all better”; like the viewers, they crave the resolution of a well plotted story. still, the pressure applied by the show’s artificial constraints can produce real transformations, remarkable to witness. couples who had begun by complaining of a sexual impasse, or wrestled with feelings of resentment and rage, or dealt with histories of infidelity and addiction ended up turning toward each other in relief, tenderness, even playfulness and joy. “now that the treatment is ending, i notice myself feeling a mixture of sad and worried about letting them all go,” guralnik tells goldner. the best she can do is hope that the foundation they have built together holds. then, there were ping and will. after weeks of effort, guralnik had at last managed to pierce ping’s caustic veneer, revealing a person more sad and disappointed than furious the neglected child hidden within. “she became so much softer over time,” guralnik told me. and yet, released from the vortex of ping’s spite, will only receded further into himself. their dance had come to an end, but they were struggling to find new steps. concluding a relationship entails its own kind of transformation. if that was where ping and will were heading, guralnik would have to find a way to shepherd them there. guralnik told me that she thinks of documentary and therapy as two sides of the same coin. “these are traditions that are after the same thing,” she said. “everyone’s trying to grasp, what’s the actual story here? what’s the truth? what’s going on?” the answer, if there is one, implicates not just her patients but herself. “it’s made me accountable for my work,” she said. “you can’t hide behind jargon. you can’t refer to other people’s theories. you just have to say what you mean.” ♦ searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash. the man who spent forty two years at the beverly hills hotel pool. gloria steinem’s life on the feminist frontier. where the amish go on vacation. how colonel sanders built his kentucky fried fortune. what does procrastination tell us about ourselves? fiction by patricia highsmith: “the trouble with mrs. blynn, the trouble with the world” sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from the new yorker. sections more © 2025 condé nast. all rights reserved. the new yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. the material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of condé nast. ad choices

jean smart and hannah einbinder return at long last with the third season of the hilarious odd couple comedy, plus more from the berserk drama about a female football team forced to survive in the wilderness it has been an age since we’ve been in the company of deborah vance and ava daniels, but absence has made the heart grow fonder. finally, season three of hacks is available to uk viewers. deborah (jean smart) is now the toast of the comedy world and has hired not one but two new writers. ava (hannah einbinder) is not among them. maybe ava should regard the fact that two people are needed to replace her as a compliment but, inevitably, she’s struggling to see it like that. so begins another delicate, hilarious dance of mutual need and shared antagonism as the greatest odd couple friendship on television enters another stage. it’s great to have them back. now, out now the berserk drama about the past and future lives of a female high school football team forced to survive in the canadian wilderness returns with a moment of calm. back in the forest, there’s a regrouping after the traumas of the winter, though trouble is just round the corner. in the present, natalie’s passing is being mourned   but what is perpetual outsider misty planning? yellowjackets continues to have its cake and eat it: simultaneously schlocky, funny and psychologically disturbing. the horror isn’t overplayed; instead, there’s a sense of suppressed but never quite containable chaos. paramount+, from friday 14 february the true crime series following a variety of homicide cases in the us returns for yet another season. as the title suggests, the focus is on the hard detective legwork involved in solving crimes whose motives and possible suspects aren’t obvious in the first couple of days. among the cases explored are the killing of a mother and her two children and a fatally escalated street robbery, which leads to detectives facing a wall of silence from a terrified community. could the perpetrator be a figure from surprisingly high up the criminal food chain? channel 4, from monday 10 february you’ve seen the ridley scott blockbuster; now prepare for the real story told by many of the people who were actually present during the so called battle of mogadishu in 1993. in this three part documentary, that includes us military personnel, civilian witnesses and, notably, members of the somali militia involved in the downing of the titular chopper. it’s a mixture of slightly overwrought reconstructions, raw footage filmed during the incident and its aftermath, and reflections on what it all meant. a gripping and frequently terrifying story. netflix, from monday 10 february sign up to what's on get the best tv reviews, news and features in your inbox every monday after newsletter promotion another series of questionable domestic wisdom from katherine ryan, who semi jokingly showcases her singular approach to family life. she’s about to head off on a 10 month tour but first she needs to straighten a few things out at home. her relationship with husband bobby (“a marriage of both love and convenience”) needs the attention of a counsellor, and her 15 year old daughter violet has to learn about keeping her mean girls streak and dressing to impress at a taylor swift show. ryan is funny, self aware and whip smart company throughout. u&w, from monday 10 february it’s a dating show from the team behind indian matchmaking   which received criticism for reinforcing the caste system, seeming a little dismissive of women with careers and under representing india’s muslim population. this series feels a little more promising, featuring the self consciously sassy and no nonsense duo hoda and yasmin, who look to guide muslims in the us through the dating minefield. along the way, they’ll explore issues ranging from the fundamental (premarital sex) to the frivolous (troublesome body hair). disney+, from tuesday 11 february as we left agent will trent in this police drama, he was at a crossroads. after being forced to arrest his detective girlfriend angie polaski, he was traumatised and on extended gardening leave. now he’s presented with an impossible dilemma: a young girl is missing and police face a race against time to apprehend her killer. they need will to crack the case and he feels obligated to try. but can he deal with the ghosts of his past? it’s a generic but involving thriller distinguished by a likable lead performance from ramón rodríguez. disney+, from wednesday 12 february

bob bakish, president and chief executive officer of paramount global, attends the allen & co. media and technology conference in sun valley, idaho, on tuesday, july 11, 2023. david paul morris/bloomberg/getty images paramount global on monday parted ways with its chief executive, bob bakish, in a seismic move that sent reverberations through the media conglomerate as it actively engages in acquisition talks with skydance media. in place of bakish, who led the company since controlling shareholder shari redstone reunited viacom and cbs corporation under one roof in 2019, will be a triumvirate of leaders: brian robbins, chief executive of paramount pictures; chris mccarthy, chief executive of showtime and mtv entertainment studios; and george cheeks, chief executive of cbs. “the board and i thank bob for his many contributions over his long career, including in the formation of the combined company as well as his successful efforts to rebuild the great culture paramount has long been known for. we wish him all the best,” redstone said in a statement. the team of three leaders will guide the company in the interim as paramount’s board negotiates a deal with skydance, which is led by david ellison, son of the billionaire larry ellison, ending the redstone family’s control of the company, which has produced blockbuster franchises including “top gun,” “star trek” and “transformers.” the relationship between redstone and bakish had become frosty in recent months, people familiar with the matter told cnn. redstone and other board members took issue with bakish’s strategic decisions, including not offloading the premium cable channel showtime and striking a deal to sell bet. the critical view of bakish came as paramount, with its heavy reliance on the cable television business, found it increasingly difficult to maintain profits amid the rapid industry transition to streaming. shares of paramount’s stock (para) have dropped nearly 50% over the last year. while legacy media companies have struggled immensely in recent years, paramount, with its vast portfolio of cable outlets including nickelodeon, mtv and comedy central, was greatly exposed to shifting consumer habits with millions of people abandoning cable each year in favor of services like netflix. supporters of the skydance deal hope that merging paramount with the ellison led company will change its fortunes. skydance has promised to invest heavily in a combined company, infusing at least $3 billion in cash to pay down debt and purchase stock, a person familiar with the matter told cnn. skydance made its “best and final” offer to paramount on sunday, the person said. the deal values skydance at approximately $5 billion. the offer aims to placate shareholders who have expressed concern with the deal on the table. those shareholders have argued the deal primarily benefits redstone and they have encouraged paramount’s board to evaluate other options. the offer from skydance would see the company purchase a swath of paramount shares at a premium price, the person familiar with the matter explained. if approved, the committee of paramount executives would then lead the company until the deal is completed and a new permanent leadership team takes the helm. in addition to ellison, a possible top executive for a merged paramount skydance company would be jeff shell, the former nbcuniversal chief executive who was fired last year after a sexual harassment claim was lodged against him. your email address will not be published. required fields are marked * notify me of follow up comments by email. notify me of new posts by email. the world's leading marketplace and community for creative assets and creative people.

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supported by the showtime series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. its couples are still navigating the aftermath. by julia jacobs one night after a blowout fight with his fiancée, josh perez was lying in bed, typing silently on his phone. he was searching for contacts for the producers behind “couples therapy,” a documentary series he and his fiancée began watching during the pandemic. the show, which follows real couples in the new york area as they undergo about five months of therapy, had become a conduit for having difficult conversations about their own relationship. perez hoped that being selected for the show could help them even more. months later, perez and his fiancée, natasha marks, sat on a couch inside a soundstage in the brooklyn neighborhood of greenpoint. across from them, on a tv set built to look like a therapist’s office, was orna guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “couples therapy.” “i guess if i was to sum up why we’re here,” marks said, searching perez’s face as she spoke, “we just recently had a little baby boy, and our emotional and physical intimacy, for a while, has taken a tank.” across the show’s four seasons   the latest was recently released on paramount plus with showtime   a total of 20 couples and one polyamorous trio have revealed the kind of intimacies that marks shared for the dissection of guralnik and, by extension, a national tv audience. online, the show has an active fandom that probes its relationships as if trading gossip inside a friend group. the attention has left most of the show’s couples grappling with both anticipated and unexpected consequences of televised therapy.

 by ailsa chang orna gurlanik is the therapist at the center of the documentary series couples therapy. paramount+ with showtime hide caption we often think of couples therapy as some last ditch effort that people make when they're pretty much ready to break up. one documentary series is challenging that idea by following the experiences of couples who are in therapy at different stages of their relationships. couples therapy gives viewers a rare look into real life therapy sessions and the deeply intimate conversations that are normally private. the series is now in its fourth season, and all things considered host ailsa chang spoke with orna guralnik, the psychotherapist at the center of the show, about what it’s like putting such intimate moments on tv. the trailer for season 4 of couples therapy. this interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.