TV is the New Reading

Professionals get personal

in Lifetime’s ‘State of Mind’

At its core, a couple separating when the wife catches the husband in flagrante isn’t groundbreaking, new or really even interesting enough to anchor a series.

When the reaction is frustration, anger and hurt – but also calm and reflective – there’s some indication that this isn’t going to be a typical show.

Lifetime’s new dramatic series “State of Mind” comes from the same production company behind the long-running and always edgy plastic surgery drama “Nip/Tuck.” In “State of Mind,” the scandal seems tempered by heart, which makes it stand out a little in the television landscape.

It also feels a little bit uncomfortable in its own skin, and I’ll address that in a moment.

In “State of Mind,” therapist Ann Bellowes, played by Lili Taylor, shares office space at New Haven Psychiatric Associates with other younger- to middle-aged professionals, including a psychiatrist, a child psychologist, a teen counselor and a lawyer who’s new in town and needs office space.

Until recently, her husband, Phil, had an office there, too, until she caught him in it with their couples counselor, of all people.

Cue the throwing of things amid shrill recriminations? Not at all. After a moment’s shock and scandalized anger, Ann calmly discusses the situation and explores with Phil how they got to this point, how they’d both contributed to the distance between them and ultimately, with gentle sadness, the need for a separation, and for Phil to move out.

Darkness

This calm rationale was one side of her emotional reaction to what was going on. The other side came out in a counseling session with a married couple who were also having problems.

As their counselor, she determined that there wasn’t enough healing and reconciling communication between them. But this came out in a venomous indictment of their marriage and themselves as individuals, demanding that after their all-but-inevitable divorce that they stay single. Wild turkeys, Bellowes seethed, showed more affection for their mates than the husband did, and the wife never opened her mouth except to complain. “Of course he’s not listening to you anymore!”

Even as she brought them to tears, it wasn’t hard to hear Bellowes reflecting on her own situation in this verdict. But that’s not the only thing going on in this building. The child psychologist, while incredibly gifted in dealing with troubled children, is under constant suspicion of pedophilia, and we don’t know any of these people well enough as characters to dismiss the suspicions being raised.

The psychiatrist, for his part, has no training for dealing with children, but became acquainted with one – the clinically depressed and suicidal son of a self-involved couple who left him at home while they vacationed in St. Barts.

He could easily have ignored the boy. He was sick of the adolescents hanging around the teen counseling center before he caught two of them having sex in his office – apparently something about this rambling Victorian office space really fires the libido. But he became upset with the blithe, unexamined pointlessness of the boy’s father – his patient – and ordered the couple to cut their vacation short and tend to their son’s needs.

Sense of proportion

Running beneath all of this drama is a strange undercurrent of ... well, the image that comes to mind is one of children dressing in their parents’ clothing. The trappings are all grown up, but the subjects are self-conscious and ill-fitting. It’s like there’s no real sense of proportion in the storytelling. There are shocking things included mainly to shock, such as the spouting of racial and homophobic slurs, onscreen coupling and suicide attempts. Really, it’s so much like the soundstage of a television drama it’s hard to suspend disbelief sufficiently to accept it as a workplace.

That being said, if it is a little overblown, the writing is strong and the show is smart and philosophically interesting, and it’s certainly worth a look.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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