I don't usually give reviews like this. In fact, I don't even login IMDb. But, for this title, I HAD to create an account and just had to tell people what an amazing show it was. I'm completely in awe of it. The superb acting, the extremely engaging script, the perfect camera-work, the subtle and soothing music in the backdrop, and the layers of complex story lines associated with each character. This show is just perfect. And the last episode in season 3 provides just the perfect end. So beautiful. As a psychology student myself, I have got to learn so much from this show. I'm no one to even comment on the brilliance of this show, but I just couldn't resist doing so anyway! I have just finished watching the last episode of the series.. such a perfect ending. Thanks to the directors and producers of the show for giving me the privilege of having such an experience; for providing an alternate reality for me to go back every week and experience the world with a part of me that heavily empathised with the protagonist.I've been left truly humbled by the show.. the raw emotions of each character and the brilliant acting did justice to the whole concept. As much as I would like them to continue making new episodes, I think there couldn't be a more perfect ending to the show.I loved every single bit of this show. Missing it already...

The Script and actors are brilliant. I could identify with the some of the situations and I just felt I was living the therapy sessions. Or actually psycho treating the patients myself. But some of the patients, Laura particularly were using Paul for their own hidden agendas, and how he kept his patience I do not know but he did.My only criticism is the death of Alex, who was an over achiever for sure, and I have met military pilots like him who are talented people in their own right. He had had a heart attack while over stretching himself running 22 miles/kms. Brought back to life after 48 hours? Then on a dive following a trainee pilot, crashed his plane. The G force he could have suffered would have made him black out after only a few months after the heart attack. Maybe his body was incinerated beyond further medical examination, but the law suit blaming Paul to me was on shaky ground. Paul was not in a professional position to say whether he was OK to return to flying. That's the Navy doctors and psychiatrists job, and they do check. I doubt if after a heart attack, the Navy would have allowed him back on active service again, despite his return to the scene. If they drop bombs they know there will be casualties, and collateral damage. So that to me (that Paul was exploring) regarding guilt was not the cause of a suicide attempt. It's their job to kill people, and the situation in Iraq was hazardous, I doubt if the Navy would have allowed one of the principal pilots to return to the scene of destruction after the pic of him was displayed on the Internet! I just felt that episode was examining the Iraq war and the death of children and civilians. And more importantly the affect or substance of the men in military service who are responsible. That's war.

Guess that season one of "In Treatment" was just an appetizer because season 2 is really hauling out the entrees in a big way. This is Theater with a capital "T". Thoroughly dependent on writing and character development, "Treatment" is delivering the goods week after week. We've already come to expect this performance level from Gabriel Byrne, Hope Davis, Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney but, like the Who said, "The Kids Are Alright". Aaron Shaw and the brilliant Alison Pill are really lighting up the screen this year. HBO has managed to score once again. Almost obviates the need for Broadway (and B'way ticket prices) when you can get this kind of thoughtful writing and acting in the comfort of your own living room.

In Treatment has been a gutsy move by HBO. In the world of television production, where the need to present program content in a hurry, and the rule of thumb that a hurried pace is a substitute for the development of characters, the medium is plagued with mediocrity as much as ever. Of course, many viewers prefer their telly fix with this subtext and the rule of hurry. Things have to be happening all the time, and expeditiously. But this show resists these conventions brazenly: with exceptions in later episodes, each half-hour session is staged in the therapist's office, where each Monday Laura (Melissa George), for example, sits on a couch facing Dr. Weston and the two talk about her problems. This intimacy grows on the viewer and becomes very absorbing - maybe too absorbing to some. A viewer is frequently confronted with profound hardships and misery below the surface that he might not want to bother with – and more,that he might find too close to home to watch. And although there is plenty of intensity and fireworks, the pace is minimalist, using Bergmanesque silence and implication in ways that might prompt some viewers to reach for their remotes. When these features of the program are combined with its dense time slotting, it runs the risk of being too much to ask of even the culturally high-ranked HBO viewer. One has to wonder if a second season might want to spread out the schedule, or somehow do one-hour shows.HBO needs to bring it back in any case, because this is exceptional television. Through the intimacy of the single scene, clear channel dialog between the very able Byrne and his well-played patients, In Treatment moves, provokes, challenges, arouses – and entertains. The writing has its lapses, but they are few.As his therapist (and teacher of years back), Wiest excels and her deeply ambivalent, often riveting exchanges with Byrne at their Friday evening sessions are finely wrought set pieces. Their time together is a well-designed vehicle for Byrne to let us know his story, the one he can't reveal during the rest of the week.The ensemble of patients and his family – perhaps because of the commanding presence of Byrne to spur them – does well, including the sixteen year old Sophie and Byrne's wife, played by Michelle Forbes. Dr. and Mrs. Weston are unhappy – miserable is more accurate – and their row halfway through the show over her infidelity is a match for any excruciating confrontation in a work of an O'Neill or a Williams.But by far the best of In Treatment is in Laura's sessions, and Melissa George informs her role with an energy and inventiveness that is both startling and marvelously disturbing. In a sense, the epicenter of the show is Laura, even when she's absent from an episode. In her raging passion for Paul, loosed in quanta among quieter but suspenseful moments of gazes and pleasantries, George's character takes confessions of impossible, painful love and turns them into potent star bursts. These are not exploding novas light years away, but launched across the table in the therapist's office, and rather than fading they refuse to cool, threatening to melt the covenant of therapist-patient. These days television rarely has the privilege of portraying the kind of tension one witnesses between Byrne and George. His efforts to impose his distance as therapist from her (and his) tormented erotic impulses are matched by her doggedness, however tainted it is by the maladjustment that brought her to him in the first place. In a sense Laura makes her therapist captive, deftly blurring the hallowed ethical line separating them. Somewhere along the line, beyond her casting in unremarkable pictures like Amityville Horror and other television work like Alias, Melissa George dived into the big waves of HBO. Beauty counts for much on television and in the movies, but at some point one has to turn action into character, and George has figured it out. And then some. With more parts like Laura in In Treatment, George just might be the reincarnation of Gene Tierney.