At its best, In Treatment, the latest dramatic offering from HBO, has a fly-on-the-wall quality that will almost make you squeamish. Take, for example, last night's episode, the first installment in the series' incredibly unusual broadcast strategy. Every night, we'll spend half an hour with a different patient of Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and then on Friday, we'll join Paul at his own therapy session. Each patient returns on their assigned day and we watch their session in real-time, spending their thirty minutes with the good doctor with them. On the first night, we met Laura (Michelle George), a woman who's clearly no longer in love with her boyfriend, is on the verge of cheating on him with a stranger, and has inappropriate feelings for her shrink. Laura's a mess and George, always an underrated actress, sold it perfectly, especially in the way she "gathered herself up" after her first major revelation (that she had done a sexual favor in a bathroom) and prepared herself for the second (that she really wished the stranger in the bathroom was the doc). It became clear that this is going to be the kind of show that's hard to turn away from. If you were given the opportunity to listen in on a doctor's therapy session, would you? What if you could watch too? It's almost enough to make you uncomfortable and a sign that the writing on In Treatment is working. If it didn't feel real, it wouldn't be as uncomfortable to watch and it would be much easier to turn away. In Treatment could be something that HBO hasn't had in a while, truly addictive television.

The second night, airing tonight at 9:30pm, centers around Alex (Blair Underwood), a Navy pilot caught up in a horrible international scandal involving a massacre. Alex pushes back at Dr. Weston, questioning his credentials and making sure he's got the best of the best before he really opens up. It's hard to say this early on, but largely due to what looks like it will be award-worthy work by Blair Underwood, this could be the most interesting night of the week. It's the one I'm sure not to miss every week. Wednesday's session features a gymnast played by Mia Wasikowska who has been the center of a suspicious accident and Thursday finds Dr. Weston doing marriage counseling with a couple (Embeth Davidtz and Josh Charles) in serious trouble. Davidtz and Charles are good, but the writing feels the most forced and melodramatic in the Thursday episode. On Fridays, we join Dr. Weston at his own therapy with Dr. Toll (Dianne Wiest).

The first week of In Treatment features some heart wrenching writing and some incredible ensemble work (especially by Byrne, who sells "listening" as well as any actor). At its best, it reminds of similarly therapeutic dialogue-driven shows like Six Feet Under and Once and Again (which featured a great patient-doctor relationship). My biggest concern is how long they'll be able to keep this up and if viewers will be interested in devoting themselves to 150 minutes a week of mostly heart wrenching therapy. Doctors get paid for this kind of heartache and, as proven out by Friday's episode, often pay an emotional toll. Will Laura have sexual problems in her personal and therapeutic life every Monday? Will we want to watch that for more than a couple weeks? It's hard to say where In Treatment will be by the end of its nine-week run and if viewers will have the emotional stamina to have made it through every episode (or even most of them). But the daring style and ambitious concept alone make it something worth checking out. At least until our therapist tells us to stop.