I don’t know whose idea this was.
Callie Thorne – who played the psycho rapist Sheila on “Rescue Me” (drugging Tommy Gavin with roofies and Viagra) – is now, in USA’s “Necessary Roughness,” a Long Island psychotherapist, taking on high profile clients based on ... well, very little.
See, sports trainer to a pro football team Matthew Donnally, played by Marc Blucas, is drawn to Thorne as divorcee Dani Santino.
Dani can’t get her own mother to quit gambling, her now ex-husband to stop cheating on her, her son to behave or her daughter to quit cutting classes. But she gets Matt to give up smoking after one hypnotherapy session, and this gets the attention of Matt’s boss, Coach Purnell.
Purnell has a wide receiver, Terrence T.K. King, played by Mehcad Brooks, who he’s signed to a multimillion contract, but from whom he is not getting his money’s worth. Between T.K.’s out-of-control personal life and his own bizarre toilet paper issues, he can’t actually catch a football anymore. This has fed a self-fulfilling cycle of failure that Dani, after maybe two sessions, neither of them especially focused, traces to T.K.’s rage against his father. She brings him to his father’s grave, urges T.K. to forgive him, and now T.K. can catch a ball again.
Dani is now wealthy enough to divorce her adulterous husband on her terms. She keeps the house, which is where she conducts her practice, despite the fact that her clients can easily overhear each other and they’re constantly being spied upon by her family – which, it doesn’t matter when she meets her clients, middle of the school day, whenever, her kids are always somehow just in the next room.
She is also now a big-name therapist and along with her work with the pro football team, she will be taking on clients in NASCAR, pro fishing tours, basketball, golfers, all kinds of high-profile gigs. It’s the USA Network, so she’ll probably take on a few pro wrestlers as well.
On paper it’s brilliant. The writers come up with a “yip” or some kind of problem for some pro athlete to be experiencing. The cameras track the problem-having pro athlete through a lot of glamorous night clubs and high-roller affairs. They show some pro sports footage, and cut occasionally to Dr. Dani’s wacky family and her budding romance with Donnally. And of course we’ve got the beautiful Dr. Dani herself, exerting her authority over the pro athlete – it’s kind of like watching Judge Judy – and 42 minutes later TA-DAH! They’re cured.
The show combines a lot of marketable elements and entertainment value in one place. And high-end therapy does provide a solid jumping-off point from which to start an endless variety of storytelling, and it is based on the life of a practicing psychotherapist in New York.
So why am I this nervous about it?
For one thing, with the possible exceptions of “The Bob Newhart Show” which aired for six seasons in the 1970s, and “Frasier” which more or less owned the ’90s, I’m not aware of a lot of successful shows centered around psychiatrists.
There was this “State of Mind” thing that barely lasted a season on Lifetime, “3 lbs.” for its partial season on CBS, and “Mental” which lasted a season on FOX. There have been psychiatrists featured – sometimes centrally – in longer-running sci-fi and crime dramas like “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “profiler” and “Criminal Minds,” but not generally as the driving focus of the production. “Necessary Roughness” might indeed have found the right combination to make it work.
For another thing, I’m concerned about the premise of the show. That therapy – especially, as it’s presented, hypnotherapy – is all but magical. That if you haven’t worked through your problems after two sessions there must be something wrong with you. This seems to present unrealistic expectations.
Also, I understand the comedy behind this, but I can’t imagine a situation where a therapist setting the clock forward to make the client think she’d gotten the full session would be considered OK. Dani’s got a professional code of ethics, and all her patients have paid for their full sessions. If she has to interrupt the session that’s one thing – they can reschedule, she can pro-rate, however she’d want to do that. But lying to the client raises some pretty basic trust issues and maybe if she’s going to have violent, out-of-control clients in her home she needs a receptionist, or maybe a bouncer.
To be fair, there are absolutely some comic elements in and among the drama. In all her work on “Rescue Me” Thorne has honed already excellent instincts for walking that line between the absurd and the profound, and in my opinion, Blucas has always projected the right level of humor in the impossible situations his characters find themselves.
So I have confidence in the actors. The concern is if the writers forget that balance. The pilot episode set the right tone, so here’s hoping they can maintain it.
New episodes of “Necessary Roughness” premiere Wednesdays at 10/9c on USA.
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