The least cynical reality show on television, Showtime’s “Couples Therapy” is absorbing as ever in Season 4 thanks to the probing questions and insights from the show’s resident therapist, Dr. Orna Guralnik. Participants this time out may be upending relationship norms on the surface — there’s a throuple! — but even so, they are working through universal struggles, conflicts and vulnerabilities.
Everything feels so charged. And yet the show has such a soothing effect because it’s predicated on the idea that conflict can happen in a safe and managed environment. That human behavior (and misery) isn’t mysterious or unchangeable.
There’s something so optimistic in that outlook. “We’re all in the grip of some kind of prism through which we see reality,” Guralnik says in voiceover as we see glimpses of her clients go about their daily lives. “Often couples, when they’re busy fighting with each other, are reenacting things that happened to them in the past.
Their trauma is holding them hostage to a very particular way of interpreting reality.” But there are other ways to see the world — or the dynamic one has with a partner — she says. And once people embrace that, they can break free of those old patterns “and suddenly the world kind of opens.
” Whether or not you relate to the people featured on “Couples Therapy” — or even like them as individuals — doesn’t matter as much as Guralnik’s reassuring presence. She’s kind and quietl.