There are shows I go to when I need to cry, and then there are shows that I go to when I need to heal. And there are few shows on TV I’ve found more genuinely healing than “Couples Therapy.”
There are a lot of things that make the show healing — the complex yet relatable and profoundly human stories of the couples, the cinéma vérité editing style, the music that gives one an almost pavlovian response — but first and foremost, there’s the show’s ship captain, Dr. Orna Guralnik, who leads the couples and the viewers through murky waters of love, anguish and betrayal with her calm, mellifluous voice.
It’s hard for me to talk about Guralnik without mentioning her pop culture predecessor, fellow Jewish therapist Esther Perel, who made real couple’s therapy accessible in her 2017 podcast “Where Should We Begin,” which is, to this day, an excellent listen.
The show is the brainchild of producer Josh Kriegman, son of two therapists, who wanted to bring the breakthroughs and emotional highs and lows of therapy to TV in an authentic way. Guralnik first came on as a consultant, but was talked into taking the central onscreen role. Five seasons later, it’s clear that she is a key ingredient in the recipe for winning TV. Shot in a studio in Brooklyn that genuinely feels like a therapist’s office, Guralnik meets with patients for around 20 hours of therapy that is broken up over the course of nine television episodes.
In the years since “Couples Therapy” premiered, Guralnik has become a fashion icon, a source of viral clips and impressions, and most of all, the source of some of the deepest cutting TV you can find today. In a world full of dramatic reality series (which have their very warranted place), Guralnik’s main goal is to quell the real drama between couples (and in one case, a polyamorous triad) and to guide them to safer shores. When she’s successful, it’s thanks not only to these sessions, but to her work with her mentor, Virginia Goldner, as well as a panel of experts, and, just as importantly, the couples themselves, who are there with a genuine commitment to improve their relationship.
In the most recent fifth season, Guralnik takes on couples with many divides, including political and ideological differences in the case of Marjorie and Jason. Over the course of their therapy, they learn, like so many of the couples features, how to really talk, how to really listen, and how to really make their partner feel seen. Jason learns how to see Marjorie’s distress over the Trump administration’s policies. Marjorie learns to, at least on some level, accept that Jason still feels a sense of optimism about it.
Yet it’s other conversations between these two that make for even better TV, like when Jason expresses profound sadness and hurt for a young Marjorie, who was put on Weight Watchers by her mom and made to hate her young body. Or when Marjorie and Jason learn to have productive conversations about how to treat their son’s ADHD instead of Jason acting defensive because of his own personal trauma around the diagnosis.
Guralnik’s Jewish and Israeli identity rarely ever comes to the fore. She was born in Washington D.C, and raised in Atlanta and Israel by two Israeli American parents, who she once wrote were the first couple she ever helped work things out. She came to the U.S. after her mandatory military service in Israel and raised her family and grew her career here.
She has treated Jewish patients on the show, like Micahel and Michal, an Orthodox Jewish couple whose religious identity is one of the few things not causing strife between them, and the Jewish Soviet refugee author Boris Fishman, who became last season’s “villain,” much to his chagrin. Yet her own Jewish identity, or really much of anything about Guralnik herself, does not come up on the show.
That is, aside from one point in season three, the first season of the show to air after October 7. In the season, filmed mostly before October 7, Guralnik treats a queer couple, Palestinian American Christine and Lebanese American Nadine. Nadine wants to open the relationship, Christine does not, and the two have very complicated relationships with trauma and their families that leak into the relationship.
Nadine and Christine don’t end up making it is a couple at the end of the season, but their different identities are mentioned in the season’s final episode.
“I’m really gonna miss you two. It’s been very moving to see how a relationship can morph and not get kind of bound,” Guralnik tells the couple. “Personally, to work with the two of you, Palestinian, Lebanese, Israeli — it’s all deeply important to create this kind of possibility.” Guralnik and Christine would later go on two have two deeply vulnerable conversations about their political and personal perspectives on Israel and Palestine for the Guardian.
“I feel love in this space. I feel like there’s a real shared experience,” Christine conceded in that same episode. It was a rare moment of TV: a Palestinian person and an Israeli person really seeing each other. And it was one of the most genuinely hopeful and — dare I say it — healing moments in a show already full of so much healing.
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