TV Talk: Steve Carell stars in Hulu’s intense, ‘Misery’-like psychological thriller ‘The Patient’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Whenever a great TV series ends, I always wonder what the creators will do next. For “The Americans” team of Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, the answer is Hulu’s “The Patient,” a tension-filled, character-driven psychological thriller that’s a worthy successor to their early 1980s Soviet spies drama.

Streaming Tuesday, “The Patient” stars Steve Carell (“The Office,” “The Morning Show”) as Dr. Alan Strauss, a therapist who is kidnapped, shackled to a bed and held prisoner by his patient, Sam (Domhnall Gleeson), who has homicidal tendencies.

Sam demands Alan conduct therapy sessions in the basement of Sam’s mother’s home. While Alan daydreams about killing his captor, Sam goes about his day job, returning home with a dinner that even Alan acknowledges makes him one of the best-fed captives in history.

When he’s not trying to devise an escape strategy, Alan grapples with his own past, including the death of his wife (Laura Niemi) and his estrangement from his orthodox Jewish son (Andrew Leeds).

While viewers have seen Carell in dramas before, the specificity of the character that emerges in “The Patient” offers Carell perhaps his best dramatic role to date. And Gleeson, who’s been the protagonist in “Peter Rabbit” and a doomed imperial officer in the most recent “Star Wars” trilogy, goes deep for a performance that’s chilling in its dead-eyed stillness.

What’s most impressive about “The Patient” is that except for the last few episodes, most of its episodes run an economical 30 minutes, making it that rare series these days that leaves viewers wanting more. There’s little padding, but there is some sophisticated character development as viewers learn more about Dr. Straus and Sam over the 10 episodes of this limited series that was produced for Hulu by FX.

As directed largely by Chris Long (“The Americans”), “The Patient” is an intense series — perhaps the episodes are short to better sustain that tautness — that might prove too much for some viewers. It’s not particularly gory, and there are plenty of moments of dark humor, whether it’s Sam’s seemingly spineless and psychologically-damaged mother (Linda Emond, “The Gilded Age”) or in Alan’s conversations with his dead therapist (an excellent David Alan Grier in a rare dramatic role). But “The Patient” explores the darker side of human psychology and its consequences without the happy gloss found in some TV series.

Credit Fields and Weisberg with a mix of foreshadowing and misdirection that will keep viewers guessing about how the series will end.

While on the surface, “The Patient” is a hostage drama, Fields and Weisberg are savvy enough showrunners that they also dive deeper. Ultimately, it’s a series about fathers and sons, faith and the terrible impact of trauma passed from one generation to the next.

During the recent FX portion of the recent virtual Television Critics Association summer press tour, series co-creators Fields and Weisberg said “The Patient” sprang from a desire to tell a story about therapy.

“We were having a tough time finding a way in because it’s hard to find drama in people talking to each other,” Fields said. “Then we stumbled upon this idea, and it seemed like, gee, there might just be some stakes in this particular circumstance, and we were off to the races once we found it.”

Unlike writing a series for broadcast or cable television, “the Js,” as they are called, welcomed the ability to tailor the show’s running time to the story rather than having to fit a set duration.

“We allowed ourselves to follow the characters through the story rather than feeling that we had to shove the plot to fill a certain amount of space,” Fields said. “Also, FX has been extremely generous in terms of what the parameters are, so you’ll see episodes in all sorts of different lengths as the show unfolds, and I think that’s reflective of ultimately what these 10 episodes wanted (to be).”