In conversations long after midnight, it helps to escape into internalized words.

That of the Irish writer CS Lewis, for example, who wrote of the "insane midnight moments".

She who quotes this is still awake because her father's death has robbed her of sleep.

He, who is listening to her on the phone, has been woken up by a cruel dream.

He could have called his mother, but dialed her number instead.

She shouldn't have answered this time because patients need limits.

But it is.

For a few minutes they help each other out of being lost.

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the features section.

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The fourth season of “In Treatment” draws on moments like these, this series from the therapy room that has been adapted over and over again.

All over the world, for the past year and a half, sleepless people have stood at the windows of their apartments, looking out, feeling like lonely stars in great darkness.

So here the abandoned therapist in her villa in Los Angeles, there her patients, who are even more affected by the pandemic than they are already.

You can build on, empathize, even if you have never looked over LA at night.

Just a little bit racist and misogynous

The talks will be conducted by Dr. Brooke Lawrence (Uzo Aduba), a kind of disabled, young Oprah Winfrey, rightly honored for her role in the series "Orange Is The New Black". The action begins in the middle of the pandemic. Her therapy palace, still built by her architect's father, looks like a museum, and her pacing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows has something of Rilke's panther. If someone does come to the suburb on the hill for a personal talk, you can see Brooke disinfecting tables and arranging test documents. How quickly such gestures got into the inventory of our serial habits.

It is not just the changing perspective between the treatment sofa and the therapist's chair, there is also the familiar view of the screen. The stories that Dr. Brooke's patients have to tell, therefore, must be drastic, the dialogues quick and astute. And when the young, bad-dreaming Eladio (Anthony Ramos) agrees during the digital therapy session to show her the room in which he leans over the PC, not just one of these standard backgrounds, the camera jumps over in his room. From then on we stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

Dr. Brooke has three patients right now. Eladio looks after a boy with a disability in a wealthy family and begs for medication to hide his bipolar disorder. Brooke develops maternal feelings for him. Then there is eighteen-year-old Laila (Quintessa Swindell) - and Colin (John Benjamin Hickey), the irascible tech entrepreneur who feels left behind after four years in jail, who is maddened by his new role as a white-collar criminal who suspects sentiment cops everywhere and yet is just a little bit racist and misogynous. Brooke's reaction with raised eyebrows: How does it work, at the same time asking for recognition and under no circumstances wanting to think into the heads of others?

Twenty-four episodes of chamber play with dialogue, in each episode a patient who comes at the beginning and leaves at the end as if you were going there yourself. Nothing has been lost in the appeal of the idea that made the Israeli series “BeTipul” successful between 2005 and 2008 and the American adaptation with Gabriel Byrne from 2008 onwards. Something is broken up, piece by piece. The process may be rapid. While Colin insults Brooke in session one, he realizes at the next meeting that he is trying to escape his fainting with his outbursts. And of course, Laila, posing as a sex addict, has a completely different problem that has to do with her grandmother and is immediately recognized by Brooke. But every fourth episode reveals something of the inadequacies of the therapist herself,which does not stick to its principles.

If you know the Israeli original or the recently published French adaptation, you will also be happy to detect cultural differences: how the therapist discusses minority rights with her patients (quite progressive), the emotional temperature of the conversations (feverish), the occasions on which tears flow ( anytime possible).

The stereotype of the young doctor in love with her therapist has been overcome.

But nothing has changed in the feelings of abandonment that loneliness can cause.

In Treatment

runs on Tuesdays at 8.15 p.m. on Sky Atlantic.