‘The Patient’ Is a Tiresome Examination of Domhnall Gleeson’s Criminal Mind: TV Review
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“The Americans,” Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s previous show for FX, built tension according to a methodical pace.
Its pleasures lay in a rigorous willingness to delay catharsis; Fields and Weisberg’s team of writers seemed actively to resist giving viewers quick and easy satisfaction, preferring to build scenes, episodes and arcs that stretched out according to their own rhythms.And their follow-up series, “The Patient,” an FX production airing exclusively on Hulu, suggests that success has prompted them to lean so far into this method that they’ve lost balance.
A languorous 10 episodes (granted, only half an hour apiece) are spent telling a story that might have, in another era, made for a tidy 90-minute movie.
The collision of Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson as, respectively, a therapist and the subject who kidnaps him, seems so hopelessly insoluble — with Gleeson’s character demanding a cure for his beyond-repair psyche — that many viewers will likely give up before they reach the end.
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