A husband and wife walk into a therapist’s office, where the husband proceeds to complain his wife isn’t working hard enough to fulfil his wildest sexual fantasies. The birthday threesome she’d planned was a nice gesture – but he couldn’t help feeling her heart wasn’t in it. He throws his arms up in frustration – as if wondering why life is so unfair.
Nothing is quite as strange as the personal lives of other people. That truth is established in sometimes unsettling and occasionally riveting fashion by Couples Therapy (BBC Two, Monday), a fly-on-the-wall reality series that crosses that Atlantic after making its US debut in 2019.
It’s hugely revealing, often depressing, and intermittently toe-curling. In other words, real life laid bare in all its excruciating rawness.We meet Annie and Mau, who are at the office (in reality a bespoke TV studio) of New York therapist Dr Orna Guralnik in order to spill their darkest secrets.
“What I want is to have zero responsibility”, says Mau, who has been married to Annie for 23 years. “To have all the sex I want without any work on my part, and it has to be spectacular and enthusiastic and genuine.”
Dissatisfied with Annie’s plans for his birthday – threesome and all – he requested his passport and disappeared to Italy. Heavens knows what he got up to there, though he presumably didn’t confine himself to a jaunt through Tuscany.
The series does honestly confront universal facts about marriage – you never really know what is going on inside another person's head
They’re at one extreme in terms of their personal issues. At the other are Elaine and DeSean. She has a short fuse, he’s an introvert who insists she doesn’t call him at work … because he’s working.
“He calmed my noise and I woke him up. It was perfect,” says Elaine of their early years together. Then the wheels fell off as the wrinkles in their personalities became blemishes the other couldn’t look past.
Having listened to couples reel off their woes all day, Dr Guralnik looks like she could use a therapist of her own. In fact, she does have a therapist, to whom she unburdens herself in long, sincere monologues.
“I was thinking how much is put on the notion of ‘the couple’,” she says. “I believe in it – that ultimately it’s a good thing for most people. I’m also aware of the limits of how much it can deliver.”
Couples Therapy is lit in muted browns and greys and shot for maximum tastefulness.
But while the series does honestly confront universal facts about marriage – you never really know what is going on inside another person’s head – the real appeal lies in its sheer unadulterated voyeurism. This is first-rate curtain twitcher TV that is sure to gladden the heart of snoopy neighbours everywhere.
