Animation
Good Times
Netflix takes a classic sitcom, Good Times, and turns it into a vulgar, violent, sexually-charged TV-MA show.
“Dr. Strauss,” Sam says, “I have much bigger problems than your other patients.”
Dr. Strauss—Alan, his friends call him—knows it. Boy, does he know.
Alan’s patient/therapist relationship with Sam began as most do: in Alan’s comfy therapy living room. Sam sat across the coffee table from him, always in a hat, always in sunglasses. Alan called him “Gene,” because he thought that was Sam’s name. And while Sam/Gene did volunteer that his father used to beat him, he mainly wanted to talk about country music.
“You’re not really opening yourself up to me,” Alan finally told him after months of sessions. “You’re going to have to be able to tell me things that are not easy to tell.”
But Sam can’t open up in Alan’s comfy therapy living room. So one night, he knocks Alan out and chains him up in his basement.
Sam knows that kidnapping and imprisoning your therapist isn’t an ideal way to, y’know, go through counseling. But Sam felt he had very little choice. He’s a serial killer, after all, and he can’t just risk Alan traipsing off to the nearest police station, can he? I mean, patient-client privilege goes only so far.
And Sam really wants to get better. He’s held off killing someone for months now. But his willpower can’t hold forever.
Naturally, Alan worries that Sam’s next victim might be, well, Alan.
So Alan sits across from his captor, trying to work through Sam’s deep issues and terrifying compulsions—using every trick in his therapist’s trunk to stay alive.
But even as he counsels Sam, he’s dealing with a few lingering issues of his own: the grief of losing his wife. The estrangement he feels from his son. And on the issues go.
Why, Alan just might walk out of Sam’s basement a little healthier himself.
If, that is, he walks out at all.
The Patient, FX’s miniseries streaming on Hulu, comes with a prestige pedigree (its creators were previously behind The Americans) and, if you excuse the expression, a killer cast. Steve Carell plays Dr. Alan Strauss (stirring a bit of controversy, given that he’s a gentile playing a Jewish character), and Domhnall Gleeson plays Sam in what some are calling a career-best performance.
But despite that critical praise, you may want to think twice before sitting on this therapist’s couch. And then maybe a third time.
While you’ll find far more gratuitous shows out there, The Patient can be brutal. I mean that quite literally: We are talking about a serial killer, and Sam doesn’t always keep his urges under control. There will be blood—and bodies. And while the first couple of episodes aren’t particularly violent, the language is harsh from the opening bell. F-words, s-words and other profanities litter every session.
Well-scripted and well-acted, The Patient might nevertheless leave some viewers feeling the need for counseling themselves before it’s done.
Alan wakes up and, finds to his horror, that he’s in a strange room and locked to several feet of chain tethered to the floor. He’s been kidnapped by one of his patients who murders people sometimes.
“I don’t mean once or twice,” the patient, Sam, says. “Every once in a while, I just—do it. And this has been going on ever since—a long time.”
Sam tells Alan that he met with “three different Jewish therapists” before he settled on Alan. While we don’t see a lot of overt signs of Alan’s faith, his son, Ezra, seems more observant: We meet Ezra in flashback where Ezra works, where he and his coworkers wear yarmulkes.
Sam doesn’t tell Alan how many people he’s killed, but he does allude to be being beaten “all the time” by his father, which he believes really messed him up. Alan dreams of lying beside his dead wife, who clutches a guitar. A disfigured baby wriggles and cries in a nearby crib.
Alan’s chain doesn’t reach the bathroom, but Sam has left him a bedpan, a container to urinate in and some toilet paper. We hear Sam urinate in the actual bathroom. Characters say the f-word five times and the s-word once. We also hear “a–,” “h—” and three misuses of God’s name, once with the word “d–n.”
Alan resists being forced to counsel his captor. “I’m not your therapist anymore,” he tells him. “I’m you’re prisoner.” Sam understands Alan’s reticence. But when he deduces that Alan’s been trying to pick the padlock that keeps him chained, Sam lays out the scenario baldly.
“I know you hate it,” Sam acknowledges. “But if you’re not going to be a part of the process, where is that going to leave us?”
Dead, that’s where, Alan deduces. He agrees to help, but only if Sam promises not to hurt him or anyone else without talking it over with Alan first. Sam promises to do his best.
We also see flashbacks to some of Alan’s happier moments: His wife, Beth, tries to teach him how to meditate, which Alan struggles with. (He picks up the practice now, in captivity.) He remembers a time when his son, Ezra, came home with a new girlfriend/wife—a relationship that apparently Alan and Beth did not approve of. (That’s perhaps because their son’s significant other is more observant of their Jewish faith, and Ezra is now more devout, too). After they’re gone, Beth throws a piece of cake against the wall. “I was going to eat that,” Alan quips, gently telling her that Ezra’s just rebelling. “Everyone does it.”
Alan fantasizes about killing Sam with a ceramic shard—stabbing it again and again into his neck. Sam shows Alan a box that’s full of his killing keepsakes. “Don’t worry, it’s not a head or anything,” he says, and he offers Alan a watch of his choosing from the box. (Most of them work, he’s quick to say.)
Sam again urinates noisily in a bathroom. We hear the f-word twice, the s-word once and one abuse of Jesus’s name.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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