Showtime packages online episodes into half-hour comedy
Not that it’s a competition (because we all know how much they love one another), but Lisa Kudrow has certainly had the most varied career of her “Friends” colleagues.
In the seven years since the show ended, Kudrow had done film roles and a star turn in the fabulous and tragically short-lived series “The Comeback.” She also executive produces the American version of the popular British show “Who Do You Think You Are?” and three years ago ventured into the brave new world of webisodes.
“Web Therapy” is a semi-improvised series in which Fiona Wallice (Kudrow), Wharton grad turned “therapist,” sees her patients via three-minute video chats. Because who needs to sit through a 50-minute hour listening to patients natter on about their dreams and feelings? Not Fiona.
Innovative and hilarious, the spots were written by Kudrow and Don Roos and ran from four to 11 minutes, providing a perfect showcase for Kudrow’s deadpan talents and drawing a panoply of characters played by stars including Jane Lynch, Bob Balaban, Alan Cumming, Phylicia Rashad, Meryl Streep and (of course) Courteney Cox. (Kudrow responded in kind by showing up on Cox’s “Cougartown.”)
Now Showtime has scooped up the series and stitched the episodes together into a half-hour comedy.
The small-screen format remains — we see the characters only as they interact with Fiona through computer screens — but Fiona’s back story is more clearly drawn. Although he is referred to only in the Web series, Fiona’s husband, Kip, (Victor Garber) is introduced early on, as is her nightmarish mother, played, because the gods were smiling that day, by Lily Tomlin.
The notion of a therapist who is clearly more troubled than his or her patients is as old as talk therapy itself and has been mined repeatedly on the large screen and small, with comedic and dramatic results — HBO’s “In Treatment” and Starz’s “Head Case” are the two most recent.
And “Web Therapy” owes a lot to “Head Case,” which featured Alexandra Wentworth as Dr. Elizabeth Goode, another narcissistic, insensitive shrink with a celebrity-studded client list (though “Head Case” was set in L.A. and the celebrities were playing themselves). But “Web Therapy” takes the premise one step further — Fiona isn’t a licensed therapist, she’s an MBA who is much more interested in leveraging her new “modality” than even pretending to be a therapist. She is all medium and no message.
In Tuesday’s episode, Fiona has to deal with more rejection when her mother turns down her business proposal, and Fiona’s therapy skills are put to the test.
Although there are many laughs to be had in the new format — watching Kudrow and Lynch go head to head works in any genre — in making the move to TV, Kudrow and Roos had to choose between the lesser of the two evils. A more traditional, and less interesting, show would follow Fiona through her daily life, which would include but not be defined by her Web therapy practice.
This might have cut down on some of the airlessness caused by bringing a Web show to TV — there is only so long one can watch a person who is not related to you by marriage or blood and serving overseas in the armed forces talk on a computer screen — but it would have been a sellout. Even as it is, some of the sharpness, the performance-art humor of the Web series is lost in translation. But still it remains something remarkable, if not quite revolutionary, anchored by Kudrow, who is not so much inhabiting a character but an ethos — the self-help movement by way of Merrill Lynch and YouTube, with outtakes thrown in at the end for good measure.
Not surprisingly, the outtakes are just as funny as the show.
Similar Posts:
- Charlie Sheen to return in ‘Anger Management’ sitcom
- Charlie Sheen no longer ‘crazy’
- ‘Beavis and Butthead’ set to return to MTV this fall
- Comic Review: Snarked #0
- Book Review: The Book of Lost Fragrances by M. J. Rose
