The Curious Comforts of a YouTube Show About Group Therapy
Eight patients sit in a circle in a sunlit room. “You seem to carry so much weight around—the weight of women,” Frank, a 50-ish newspaper reporter, tells Pam, a mid-30s comparative-lit professor, as their psychoanalyst looks on approvingly. Pam’s feminism, Frank continues, “feels less empowering and more like a burden.”
But that’s too much for Manny, a carpenter. “When you’re not a white man,” he scolds Frank, “that’s what it feels like, bro.”
The group laughs as if they’re accustomed to confronting one another. So it’s no surprise when Rebecca, a lawyer, calls out Manny for being “Pam’s pitbull.” The way Manny’s behaving, she says, “I think there is something that you’re hiding.” Soon, everyone is wondering aloud if Manny and Pam have broken “the first rule of group”: No fraternizing outside the therapist’s office.
This is the: seven 15-minute episodes that debuted quietly on YouTube last month. The fictional show, which follows a cadre of actors as they improvise group-therapy sessions (presided over by a real New York City therapist, Elliot Zeisel), was produced before the coronavirus pandemic, but it feels remarkably current. With the nation reeling from a deadly health crisis and erupting in righteous protest over police abuse of black Americans, who among us couldn’t benefit from some free therapy right now?
