The set-up for FX on Hulu’s “The Patient” is a captivating one. A serial killer named Sam Fortner (Domhnall Gleeson) decides that he needs more intense therapy than he’s been getting from his regular visits to Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), and so he kidnaps the shrink and chains him to the floor in his basement. Can Alan keep Sam from committing murders while also protecting his own safety? How serious can Sam be about going straight when he’s actively committing the crime of kidnapping? Gleeson and Carell add notable depth to their characters whenever “The Patient” commits to really being a psychological two-hander about two very different men trying to find common ground that keeps Alan alive. Sadly, it often defeats the efforts of its leading men via some pretty lethargic plotting, a lack of veracity when it comes to Sam’s actual crimes, and an inconsistent POV. There’s just barely enough to like here for fans of the two performers, but too little to otherwise recommend casual admittance to “The Patient.”
Created by Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg (“The Americans”), “The Patient” opens with Alan waking up in a nondescript basement. He has blurry memories of how he got there, but his patient, Sam, quickly fills in some of the gaps. Sam needs intensive therapy to stop murdering the people who annoy him in his everyday life. Being a child of abuse has given Sam an inability to forgive conflict or disagreement. He’s a serial killer who strangles the people who piss him off, channeling the anger he feels at his abusive father into his victims. In an interesting twist, Sam is a health inspector, a profession that inherently allows for no less than 100% perfection when it comes to following the rules. The people in Sam’s life who don’t follow the rules, sometimes even just societal ones that they may not perceive in the same way, end up dead. So, in a sense, he needs Alan to help him with anger management.
It’s a great idea that almost immediately starts to lose traction with plotting that feels content to tread water when it needs to build tension. One of the problems is that the writers start throwing in new characters instead of heightening the predicament of its central one. We meet Sam’s mother Candace (Linda Emond), who seems shockingly apathetic about a grown man being held prisoner in her basement. She knows her son is a serial killer but chooses not only to look the other way but to often enable his darker side through her refusal to confront him about his crimes. The show also jumps to Sam’s office a few times and to encounters he has outside of the house, including an awkward attempt to mend fences with an ex-partner. None of this works in the grand scheme of things because it deflates the tension that could have come with a more confined POV. A ten-episode series that never leaves a serial killer’s basement other than through flashbacks might have been too daunting, but it would have been much scarier.
As Alan attempts to “treat” his kidnapper, he remembers key events from his recent past, most of them centered on how he might forever leave his son Ezra (Andrew Leeds) in a regretful state of conflict. Alan was disappointed in how Ezra acted when his mother Beth (Laura Niemi) was dying, unable to mend the rift between them that formed when Alan became an Orthodox Jew. How parents forgive (or fail to forgive) their children when they don’t do exactly what mom or dad think they should do is an interesting and unexpected theme of “The Patient.” Sam was formed by an abusive father and Alan realizes that his final interactions with his son could emotionally scar him for life.
Of course, with so much of Alan’s journey playing out alone in a basement, the writers needed a way to capture what’s going on in his mind, so they stage scenes in which Alan fantasizes conversations with his own, recently deceased therapist, played by an effectively soft-spoken David Alan Grier. However, these scenes feel forced in terms of thematic underlining, often explicitly stating what Alan is thinking or learning in any given episode. They lead to the overall feeling that “The Patient” plays more like a term paper instead of a true human drama. This is a show that needs to carefully balance its ideas with realistic horror, and it quite often ignores the latter. Even Sam’s murders feel like a concept more than a reality as if the compulsion of men who actually kill was never fully researched or considered. Yes, not all serial killers are the same, but true crime fans will find Sam’s inconsistency frustrating, especially given how the crimes he commits over the course of at least this season would almost certainly get him caught.
It’s a testament to the talent of Carell and Gleeson that the frustrating storytelling choices of “The Patient” can so often be overwhelmed by the decisions of the show’s leading men. Carell goes more subdued than he has ever gone on television, finding the register of a man who has likely rarely raised his voice in his entire life, and one who realizes that his greatest asset in this situation may be his ability to work Sam psychologically instead of physically. Gleeson also goes subtle—maybe too much so, but it allows him to convince viewers that Sam really is trying to change as he listens to the doctor’s advice and battles the demons in his head without the opportunity to externalize that conflict. They’re both very good.
Which makes one wish they were on a better show overall. “The Patient” ends up feeling too much like a concept in search of a show, a program that never quite figures out how seriously to take the danger inherent in its set-up, content to always make viewers think instead of taking the risks that would be required to thrill them. [C+]
“The Patient” debuts on FX on Hulu on August 30.