Dear Glen,
I’m beginning to wonder if we are hitting upon a certain entertainment axiom that states something like “bad therapy makes for good drama, while good therapy makes for bad drama.” Tonight’s marital therapy episode was certainly wonderfully entertaining, which, following the axiom, means that this was a disastrous therapy session. You are dead-on right that there is no clear reason for Carmela to be invited into the treatment, and the ensuing cat fight between the two women should have been pretty predictable to just about everyone except the three in the room. That Tony becomes predictably fed up with both of them completes the dramatic arch. The writers almost never let us down on this show!
The truth is, in all the training of professionals I do on the topic of marital therapy, rule No. 1 is you either do individual treatment OR you do couples treatment, but you try your very best not to do both with the same patient(s). You’d better have a really good reason if you break this rule. The reason is that if you try to do both, you end up seriously diluting both treatment modes. Now, this I think may answer our question of why the hell Melfi would court such therapeutic disaster. What is so ingenious about the writers is that, wittingly or not, the quickest way to turn down the heat between Jennifer and Tony is to introduce the lioness Carmela into the room. Diluting the therapy may be a small price to pay for keeping Tony and Jennifer from crossing much more disastrous lines. Meanwhile, is this a perpetual cliffhanger of a show or what? I’m dying to see what happens next. “Just when we think we’re out, they pull us back in!”
Wonder what Peggy and Joel think.
Phil
