‘In Treatment’ Is Back. How Does That Make You Feel?

The writer Jennifer Schuur (“My Brilliant Friend,” “Unbelievable”) has seen the same therapist every week for 17 years. “It is one of the most significant relationships of my life,” she said. Sometimes friends and family question that longevity.

“I say, ‘I walk out every single time feeling better than I did going in,’” Schuur said. “‘So why would I stop that?’”

She hasn’t stopped. She kept up with her appointments, remotely, all through Los Angeles’s lockdown. And last summer, when HBO executives began to consider a revival of the therapy-focused drama “In Treatment,” she and Joshua Allen (“Empire”) quickly signed on as showrunners. This new “In Treatment,” which stars Uzo Aduba as the clinical psychologist Dr. Brooke Taylor, premieres on HBO on Sunday, offering four episodes per week for six weeks.

In a year in which record numbers of adults have reported anxiety, depression and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, an experienced — and yes, OK, fictional — clinician is here to help.

“Not to use a buzzy grad-school word like ‘zeitgeist,’ but it’s the right show for the right time,” Allen said.

The original “In Treatment,” set in Brooklyn, began on HBO in 2008, itself an adaptation of a popular Israeli series, “Be’ Tipul,” set in Tel Aviv. It had an unusual structure. A therapist — Assi Dayan in “Be’ Tipul,” Gabriel Byrne in “In Treatment” — saw a different patient each night. And then, on the fourth or fifth or sixth night of the week, he saw his own supervisor. Episodes consisted entirely of two or sometimes three people talking, mostly about feelings.

Alessandra Stanley, writing in The New York Times, suggested that this premise seemed about as appetizing as a haggis buffet. Screeners changed her mind. “This show is smart and rigorous, with a concentration that bores deep without growing dull,” she wrote. The show lasted three seasons, wrapping in 2010 with a scene of Byrne’s Dr. Paul Weston disappearing into the anonymity of a Brooklyn crowd.

The revival of “In Treatment” wasn’t a cynical move, exactly, but it was an expedient one. In the midst of a pandemic, cable channels were reporting anxiety, too.

“We were discussing ideas for shows that could be produced with a smaller cast and production footprint — something like ‘In Treatment,’” Casey Bloys, the chief content officer for HBO and HBO Max, wrote in an email. “Then the next question was, How about a new version of ‘In Treatment’?”

Allen and Schuur committed to delivering the same pleasures of the original — the radical intimacy, the hyper articulacy, the intense focus on the psychodynamics of two people in a nice room. (There are Easter eggs, too, like an email from Paul.) But even the room is different. The show has traded Paul’s Brooklyn brownstone for a meticulously decorated midcentury bungalow in Baldwin Hills, an affluent, predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles.

“It’s a very different look for the show than the original had,” Schuur said, “definitely a little bit warmer; there’s lots of windows and glass and greenery.” There is a couch. It is sapphire and looks extremely comfortable.

There are other, less cosmetic changes. Rather than centering on a white man, this new show spotlights a Black woman. “It just felt important, frankly, to be able to talk about therapy in the context of communities of color,” Schuur said.

Brooke’s lived experience helps her to identify with her patients of color. “Knowing what it’s like to be marginalized on multiple levels, she can’t help but to bring that into the room with her,” Allen said.

Aduba (“Orange Is the New Black,” “Mrs. America”), whom Allen first saw on Broadway in “Godspell,” was the first choice for the show. She had never seen “In Treatment,” and the initial scripts for the new version confused her.

“My brain wasn’t really computing how that could work,” she said. “How can there only be two people sitting there?” But after she watched one of Byrne’s episodes, she accepted the role, attracted to the character of a gifted clinician unable to respond to her own crises.

“She is a person who knows how to show up for other people in a way she’s not always able to show up for herself,” Aduba said.

The showrunners made sure that those other people represented a varied patient population. “Put it this way,” Allen said. “It’s not a Woody Allen kind of therapy.” The patients — Anthony Ramos’s Eladio, a Latino home health aide; John Benjamin Hickey’s Colin, a white parolee; and Quintessa Swindell’s Laila, a Black teenager — supply racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, as well as diversity of age. The patients had to emerge as complicated and fully realized characters while also allowing discussions of class struggle, white fragility and the #MeToo movement to enter the therapeutic space.

“Jennifer and I, we said to ourselves, if we are going to do this, we cannot shy away from the world we live in now,” Allen said. “Like, this is not a fantasy show — there are no dragons, there’s no hiding, there’s no escape.”

Hickey (“The Big C”) sees his character as the writers’ way of taking on “the patriarchy.” “But they did it in such an egalitarian way that instead of being punitive with the character, they just created an incredibly three-dimensional, complex, kind of heartbreaking [expletive],” Hickey said. “So it was a real blast to play.”

Swindell (“Euphoria”) felt a particular connection to their character, a queer young woman coming of age in a world that doesn’t value her. “All of the work that I’ve done for ‘In Treatment’ is so honest and so real,” she said. “Because it was like, how could you not feel the weight of what this young girl is going through?”

In making a show about the way we live now, the showrunners had to decide how to incorporate the Covid-19 pandemic. They made bets — successful ones, it turned out — that someone like Brooke would still be working from home and that vaccines would have become broadly available.

“We were trying to have it be safe for these patients to come into Brooke’s home unmasked,” Schuur said. (Talk therapy becomes a lot trickier when you can’t see anyone’s mouth. Same goes for TV shows.)

In the winter and spring, when vaccines were still scarce, the production itself had to take more precautions. On a February afternoon, I visited the set virtually and watched a small corps of production assistants — in gloves, masks and face shields — surround Aduba, smoothing a bed and administering touch-ups as the actress dried her eyes, took deep breaths and circled her arms, readying herself for the next take. It felt wrong, somehow, to see the staff intruding on such an intimate moment. But that’s always been the appeal of “In Treatment,” the feeling that you were infringing on two people’s most private interactions.

Some of those interactions are now more distanced. In a nod to the changes in therapy that the pandemic has wrought, this season shows Brooke meeting with Eladio by videoconference. That detail excited Dorian Traube, a professor of social work at the University of California who studies telemedicine.

“I love that they’re doing telehealth,” she said. “Because it’s realistic, right? It is what the vast majority of people who are getting care right now are using.”

The changes to the therapeutic model of “In Treatment” run deeper than available technology. By focusing on a Black clinician and guaranteeing a diverse client roster, this version of the series has a crusading aspect, a desire to reduce the stigma attached to mental health care that persists within some communities of color.

Allen felt that stigma growing up on Chicago’s South Side. If you needed therapy, the conventional wisdom ran, that meant you were crazy. “So I feel like if one person looks at this show and goes, ‘Oh, OK, you don’t have to be in a straitjacket to have therapy,’ then our job is done,” he said.

Brooke may have her own struggles, but she has an almost preternatural ability to understand her patients. Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble, a clinical psychologist who studies mental health disparities, is eager to see a depiction of a maximally effective Black clinician. She thinks it will have an encouraging effect on people of color seeking care. “If we can see it, we can believe it,” she said.

Ramos (“Hamilton,” “In the Heights,” “She’s Gotta Have It”) believes it. Two years ago, after experiencing what he described as “the lowest of low moments,” he began going to therapy twice a week. It helped, and continues to help. The show, which Ramos calls “a gift from God,” lets him show others what successful treatment, like the treatment he experienced, can look like.

“I hope when people watch it, they can feel, like, this comfort,” he said. “Hopefully people can have the courage to say, ‘Maybe I’ll look for a therapist and see what that’s about.’”