I’ve only watched the first couple of discs (of season one), but I enjoy what I see so far. Here are some initial, premature thoughts on the series:

• Makes you think about your own life and issues, some of which are similar to the patients in the show.
• You start to feel a lot more normal than some of these patients.
• Paul’s job is a lot harder than I envisioned. I would not want to be a therapist after watching this show!
• Uses a form of “elapsed time” (or something like that) to fit hour-long sessions into 26 minute episodes. This is interesting because sometimes there’s an obvious break in the flow of the session (where viewers could assume more time has passed), but other episodes it’s all real-time, so the “stage clock” is clearly moving faster than a normal clock.
• I first thought that watching two people talk to each other for entire episodes would be incredibly boring, but it’s actually quite intense! You can feel Paul’s anger wanting to explode out of him, but somehow he keeps his head straight.
• You start to wonder what these patients are like outside of Paul’s office. As viewers, we only see them when in front of their therapist – kind of like a safe shelter from the real world.
• Do all therapists see their own therapist? We saw this in The Sopranos, too.
• HBO must have done a lot of research before creating this show, because emulating a serious profession like psych can’t be taken lightly. Any kind of mishap or inaccurate portrayal could result in negative press/feedback.