In Treatment Season 4Aka The One Time BWWM romance is actually interesting…and no one talks about it.
I don’t know what it is about the idiosyncratic nature of fandom or the pulsing waves that dictate what and who is interesting to look at and ship but I am truly surprised at the lack of discussion about a televised couple who actually provide the kind of visual representation so many black women like myself have desired.
I don’t know. Are we not watching because we are busy elsewhere? Where are we? Because if you have not seen or viewed Brooke Taylor, Phd and her on-and-off again beau Adam on HBO’s In Treatment I just don’t know what to say.
Listen. I know that the black lady from Dr. Who (I know her real name is Freema but I enjoy New Amsterdam and refuse to commit to a ship so I intentionally don’t know their names) and the dude who played the unfortunately good looking klansmen in Black KKKlansmen are a whole lot of fun on New Amsterdam. And I know that some of y’all are still thinking that Olivia Pope and Fitz Grant were the best possible match on Scandal until it became impossible to believe it so because Shonda Rhimes ruined her characters beyond the pale of what made them interesting in the first place. I know many of y’all are still smarting from Sleepy Hollow’s disavowal of their potential romance between Abby Mills and Ichabod Crane. And Lord help you some of y’all really believe that transphobic, homophobic, racist “romance” in Behind Her Eyes is something to talk about. Hint: it’s not.
It’s been a hard row to tow on the journey of BWWM (black women/white men romance journey) and honestly most of us don’t even claim that that’s a subgenre we enjoy because who has time to suffer online but y’all…
Um…have you seen this show?
In case you are unaware or taking a sabbatical from television watching or don’t have a homie with HBOMax, these screenshots are from In Treatment. The series that originally starred Gabriel Byrne that the network rebooted this year with a new lead in Uzo Aduba. Now, as many of you may know, it takes a lot more than a black body to move me to watch something. Particularly because my sense of the character named Brooke Taylor, is that she was originally written for a white (normative) character. But, to my joy and surprise, they did the work necessary to reverse engineer a color conscious character from the original sketch. This Brooke Taylor lives in the Black Beverly Hills neighborhood of Baldwin Hills and is quite adept at thinking about how race, gender, and class are integral parts of the social fabric we’ve all been woven into. There’s some really fascinating moments in her back and forth with patients where she lays out the conspicuous and inconspicuous avenues that privilege trafficks its wares if on is cis, white, heterosexual and, often, male. It’s rare to see a black woman lay into a white man with such adroit style that the white man is reduced to tears and no words.
Wait let me back up a step. In Treatment, an adaptation of the Israeli series, BeTipul, is a series about a psychotherapist who meets with a different patient each day while also seeing a supervisor for their own murky lives. In Treatment’ s style is a variation on strip programming in that instead of weekly episodes, the series is contracted into 4–5 daily episodes. Think of this like a daytime soap but significantly shortened at an average of 21–27 minutes per episode. In its first season (my personal favorite), HBO tried an experimental approach at the time: A new episode aired Monday through Friday framing the content through weeks in some sort of hermetically sealed Zip file. Audiences could, if they chose, follow all the characters week after week in their sessions or they could choose their favorite one and track that way. If, one was, like me, unable to wait each day for the new episode and also loved All of the characters mostly equally, HBO’s On Demand would have all 5 episodes for that week available. It was bingeing before there was a word for it.
And it was delightful.
I mention this because in the reimagining of In Treatment for season four the episodes were cut to 4 instead of 5 and split between two days — Monday and Tuesday. Still to me operating like a soap I watched all the episodes but I really liked watching the separated weeks with characters. While my favorite set of sessions was technically Colin’s (John Benjamin Hickey who was also in my other favorite show The Good Wife causing AS MUCH pathos as he is now. The man is a golden god of pathos performance subsumed as too-smart-for-his- own-good-white-man) weeks because it reminded me of the Paul/Gina dynamic and God help me Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest could burn that one room set up to the fucking ground week after week after week, I looked most forward to the ones that featured the therapist herself. Brooke’s weeks. Not necessarily because of her “supervisor”/sponsor Rita (Liza Colon-Zayas) who is so adept at reading Brooke’s bullshit she should be a detective or because watching Brooke in flagrante delicto on her own is sometimes a bit too close to home.
Or maybe that IS part of the reason her weeks are most interesting to me. Let me describe Brooke Taylor, Phd. Brooke wears a mostly well done wig (we’ll get back to that) that is a bob, Brooke is a dark skinned black woman who could not pass or be ambiguous if her life depended on it, Brooke has a nice sized noticeable gap in between her front teeth, Brooke is T-H-I-C-K bodied in a way that means her wardrobe is mostly flawless — sometimes she wears colors and fabrics that make me scream TOO MUCH. TOOOO MUCH. And that woman knows she bathes herself in fabric. There’s never a skinny nothin piece of clothing. Give Brooke ALL THE FABRICS. But The hot pink satin thing with the tuxedo jacket??? What. The. Actual. Fuck. Brooke also has an array of gold and silver jewelry that really show off the smooth tones of her skin. Brooke environs from an upper class swarth of Black folks and I’m sure if the show had time we would have learned that Brooke pledged a black sorority at Stanford (she wore an awful lot of pink in that house I’m just saying) while earning her undergraduate degree.
But Brooke is also a psychotherapist receiving her doctorate from Columbia and doing her residency the one the only Paul Weston in Baltimore but only after Brooke dropped out of Wharton, became an alcoholic and put herself in rehab. I’ll leave some details out because, well, I think you should watch the show but suffice to say there’s much complexity to Dr. Taylor.
So I guess I’m saying there’s a few things she and I have in common. Her body shape and coloring and THAT GAP is a close approximate to mine. I tried to wear a wig one time — my sister told me we need to branch out a bit more — but I look at a few of the ones Brooke wears and…well I get it. I just wish she would let herself take it off at night and wrap up in her scarf or bonnet because…ain’t her head hot? Now it could be a sew-in with real pieces left out to blend I suppose but…I think it’s a wig. Either way, shouldn’t it be protected from the elements?
I ain’t an alcoholic nor am I an AKA (but they run in the family trustttttt) but I get the part of her that knows she’s good at what she does and that thinks about her degree as a sign post for others but one she doesn’t too much internalize. I also enjoy some gold and silver jewelry.
The gap…I gotta go back to the gap because it’s such a part of Aduba’s face and characterization. She doesn’t hide it and she isn’t ashamed of all her teeth not squarely standing together in solidarity. I get that as mine do the same thing. And outside of Lauren Hutton, the gap doesn’t strike as an aesthetic plus socially.
But then again pulled together Aduba’s Brooke wouldn’t function as the traditional standard of beauty. The body type, the skin tone, the hair texture, the gap teeth all present an opportunity to engage with beauty on a Black woman’s terms and it is something to watch and study and study one’s own self for purchase.
But that’s not the end of this tale. And I started with this and then seemed to digress and maybe bury my lede but the sweet part of this essay is who she is paired with. She got paired with Joel Kinnaman. 6 foot 5, lanky, half Swedish, tall drink of water Kinnaman. He’s not everyone’s type but he’s a specific type not easily accessed by all.
This? This is big(gish). I study race and casting for a living and I spend a lot of time talking about types and let me tell you, if a producer and a casting director were to go for this interracial mix, the Brooke type would typically look like a Kerry or a Gina or a Rosario or a Meghan. Yes, Viola had Liam Neesom in Widows — a point we can certainly return to on another day — but that’s one body. And we are already talking about a less than thimble full pool of talent who may have been deemed eligible.
Kinnaman types are reserved for white women. Mirielle Enos was his partner in The Killing but I mean she also was married to Brad Pitt (aka Daddy Brad) in World War Z. Check out the love interest in Robocop, and those other little movies that you watch because you want to see Kinnaman walk around shirtless — I know it ain’t just me paid for The Informer. The type is the same.
Yes I know he was kinda with Rene Elise Goldsberry in Altered Carbon but if you really want to break down the way that show did non traditional casting we can do that…on another day. And I said…kinda.
Types aren’t scientific. I write about this in my book but the selection of actors best for the part is a process of informally learned knowledge about who and what are acceptable and in what contexts. And, the folks who make these decisions are guided by tried and true formulas that will please the most people and offend the least (important). Even though Kinnaman has some kind of bass and timbre to his voice that makes him sound awfully regionally specific, he’s not cast too often against Black women. And even though I am not nearly as infatuated with his look in this season of In Treatment — I presume the beard and the hair are there to either age him up beyond his already precious 41 years for some reason or to make him look like an ambiguously questionable good guy which…sighs — that he’s the type selected to pair with Brooke?
Listen…I slid down in my chair in that first sequence between them. I forgot my home training and talked at the scene of their first meeting and I might have even groaned because of the way he wasn’t cowed by the physicality of interacting with her. It was something I had not seen before in mediation..er…television and film. And it FELT like something special to watch. I called my good black girlfriend who loves Kinnaman as much as me and who understands how a dearth of phenotype and body type visibility can quietly erode at your core self. We SQUEALED together because of the kindness and the commitment on both actors parts to these characters relationship. We squealed because this woman with a body that is lovely and also not often shown on television or film in contexts of romance and sexuality crumbles into Adam’s for the first greeting. The first kiss between the two is this pull/pull and it’s comfortable and not odd or awkward or…it’s lovely.
As are the majority of their interactions throughout the season. There are most certainly problems in their dynamic and the question of if Adam is a “good guy” are always in play but you know what? I most relish their interpersonal dynamic AND chemistry AND I honestly wonder why this relationship is elided from conversation both at the level of the show’s publicity — ain’t nowhere on the page or at the level of critical discourse — that’s y’all.
This dude yearns for this woman and the ways that his body turns toward her are something not to be missed if romance is your bag AND the way that she pulls him toward her, that she grabs him as he walks away because he’s felt rejected (a constant theme), and turns him and his tall Swedish ass toward her is just…I mean I ain’t seent it. I thought to myself “oh well maybe we won’t get any love scenes that’s alright I’ll take looking at Adam in a bunch of sweaters and henleys as a prize” but that is not what happened. Episode 16. OHHHHH. After the hard stuff that happens in the first half of the episode, the second half is an interesting turn. And the way all this set up begins with him loving her wrist and her neck and her shoulder (that’s what he says y’all that is what he says) it just gets better as he raises up and pulls her with him and behind him and invites her to take his hand as he leads her to her bedroom where…I mean, just…you know…watch it.
I don’t think they’re the best couple. I don’t know if they’re a good couple even. The thing about In Treatment is that it rightly is focused on Brooke and her internal dark night of the soul. She and Adam are an external illustration of the existential crisis she faces. You can feel that in the ways that the show ebbs and flows around their origin story and how much about their relationship is elided and how much of their future is premised on Brooke finally really knowing what she wants and ultimately if she wants him. I want Brooke to reveal more in those conversations between them but there’s part of her that feels she has to adhere to some “cool girl” that she mistakenly believes he still wants but Lord if she’d just say it I bet there’d be some good discussion. I also wonder why race really never comes up between them when it so easily does in all her other conversations. Maybe it speaks to the lack of faith she has in his ability to keep up with her or her fear that he couldn’t but she doesn’t try. I wish she would have though.
I’m moving through these thoughts because 1) NO ONE ELSE IS HAVING THESE CONVERSATIONS and 2) isn’t it wonderful to be able to talk about a big boned/big hipped Black woman who owns this two piece sweatsuit material outfit with material that comfortably stretches with the wideness of her body and finishes with this giant ass bow that sits on the side of her waist who can sit on a couch in side profile to be comforted by her beau.
It seems, more now than ever, that the concept of representation mattering has hit its zenith and although we as audiences and critics can certainly think harder about what they mean when they utter this catchy phrase , re-presentations of people who do not exist in historical mediation as figures of power or of consensual romance and lust are meaningful. More meaningful is that those on-screen bodies have heft to their characterizations and complexity in their choices to compliment what we SEE. There’s much more I desire to see and know about Dr. Taylor and her romance with Adam no last name. I wish to know minutiae like does she ever wear a bonnet or a scarf to bed? Does she own house slippers? Where does she keep her wigs? Does she watch Tik Tok at 3 am? What did Adam say to her on their first meeting?
In the final episode of the season they dance together to Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to you” and while I absolutely abhor the song and have since it came out in 1994 (those HORNS sound like an EMS truck coming to pour water on your romantic moment), there was something about watching them sing the lyric out loud and talk about junior high dances that hailed me back to memories and nostalgia of my own. That is what I call sonic resonance and a kind of meaningful representation for a viewer.
I could have put up a bunch of disclaimers about how this isn’t fetish and this isn’t overriding or superseding black love. It’s not. But there are these BWWM relationships slowly happening in film and television with this under the radar feel almost seeming like a way to protect them from too much close scrutiny or to prevent too many questions or requests for specificity regarding the dynamic. The bodies here fulfill something for me as a viewer but the bodies alone can never equate to true meaningful representation. However, damn the scrutiny or the fear of too much attention going toward the romance and leaving the “actual work” behind! The work done here on the part of the writers and the actors to build dimensional characters in a highly reactive relationship should be looked at and scrutinized and discussed and shared and not hidden under a bushel in favor of conversations on quality. No for some of us, THIS is the quality we’ve been waiting for.
I don’t know why y’all aren’t watching this damn show. I don’t know why many of the shippers of so many fandoms I have observed or participated in ignore this one to suffer with the others that aren’t actually in service of what you want but I ask you to reconsider and do yourself a favor and watch and fanwank this. It’s so pleasing.
Also I WANT TO TALK TO PEOPLE ABOUT THIS AND IT DOESN’T HELP IF NO ONE HAS WATCHED IT. DAMMIT.
