The Americans producers Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s brand-new psychological thriller, The Patient, can be seen on FX on Hulu.
The 10-part television series features Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson and explores what happens when a formerly-secret serial murderer tries to renounce his violent methods.
It does not, however, resemble a criminal psychology session. Instead, Sam (Domhnall Gleeson), his on-screen character, kidnaps his therapist, Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), and imprisons him in his boyhood home.
Fans of Carell, who have become accustomed to watching him in a range of characters from the endearing Michael Scott from The Office to the comic Brick Tamland in Anchorman, will see him play the considerably darker and more nuanced Dr. Alan Strauss in The Patient.
Dr. Alan Strauss is a quiet disturbed therapist who gets imprisoned by Sam, one of his patients, and finds himself confronting his problems while doing so.
Audiences discover Alan is mourning the loss of his beloved wife Beth when they first meet him (Laura Niemi). He is also dealing with his son Ezra’s distance from him because to Ezra’s extreme Orthodoxy (Andrew Leeds).
He is plagued by images of the Holocaust as his confinement gets worse.
Fields and Weisberg clarified that Alan is not based on a real person, but they emphasized that they wanted to make sure Sam and Alan were “genuine” and “dimensional.”
We always attempted to maintain the characters seeming real and three-dimensional, says Fields. If we could do that and not let them feel like clichés, then we felt like we could have something that would be of interest to us and we believed that if it was interesting to us, maybe it would be somewhat interesting to others as well.
The challenge was to make Sam sympathetic and relatable because, according to Weisberg, “one of the characters, Dr. It’s not really intriguing to Joe [Fields] and I to develop a tale with a good man and evil guy since Alan Strauss is obviously intrinsically likeable and relatable.
Tuesdays are The Patient days on FX and Hulu.