“ Oh please, Lucas!  People were simply commenting on a fictional character. Since no one truly knows her motives and intentions yet, it's a topic of discussion. You chose to draw conclusions from that and insult real people, while attempting some moral high-ground? Please... Those who can't distinguish fiction from real life are much more disturbing, "  --- KD

Part One:
Fictional vs. Real Characters To Assess Our Emotionally Energized Responses To Them

KD:

I don’t agree with Lucas on any topic --- in effect, a prissy, nagging guy who attacked me, unprovoked, within seconds of my first innocuous post in this forum a few days ago . . . one of the several gays who, along with a handful of women groupies, seem to monopolize about 75% of the posts in every forum thread (several dozens).  

Brief Clarification for Buggy Prof Visitors (Added March 29th, 2008)

Hard to say for sure what ailed these guys. Most likely, they couldn't’t stand a confident heterosexual guy horning in on their sputtering tete-a-tetes with the girls; bad bad hetero- boy, right?  Anyway, they quickly became good fodder for some amused teasing on my part. Couldn't help it, they were asking for it! What a riot!  What fun! 

Anyway --- or did I just say that? ---it’s their right, if they want, to struggle with raw identity issues and envisage themselves as women and go around parading their make-believe gender-change on the web for all to see and join in. Or as I was chastised by one of them to my mirth, “Lucas” ---whose avatar photo, please note, made him uncannily resemble a 60 year-old Gabby Hayes of Roy Rogers western-movie fame, lengthy white beard and all and tobacco stains on its hairy edges near his toothless mouth --- “is a female, a lady, a dame; got it gordon?”  Similarly , like anyone else, they have a right to lead a life of their choosing and not suffer discrimination. 

Beyond that, though --- what?

Well, they got no free pass from me for their silly priggery and fussy passive-aggressivity that led, for a few days anyway, to my mirthful toying with their grumpy old-maid peevishness.

Apparently, I was seen as their worst nightmare.  Just imagine! . . . a manically fantasized he-man hetero-dumbo had the nerve to bust in on their exclusive girls-night-out yak-yak with one another and their tiny clutch of female groupies: with, to boot, their yacketing stuff full of gossipy tidbits about their personal lives and mutual condolences or congratulations, all depending on what spectacular quotidian trivialities struck them as worth narrating.     Small wonder they all began braying for the buggy prof’s instant cyberspace execution  . . . followed, I imagine, by his hoped for real execution if they could only get the hetero's dumb-ox hetero head under a three-foot long guillotine blade.  Or as 4 Bee, something apparently of a self-anointed spokesman, put it so testily in his first post about bad bad buggy boy:

Solong, darling, what's going on in this thread?
I was away for couple of days, and by coming back I found
this freak gordongordo troll here jamming all the good posts.
Is there a way we can get rid of this nightmare?

Solong, I trust you will find a way! One disturbed gordon troll sinking
such a good thread.

Love  4bee”

And again a few hours later, while I laughed in delight at his persnickety sarcasm, 4Bee followed up with this gem:

Gordon:

By reading your very first post, with the above quoted text, it became quite clear - you've been trolling here--- countless words and little substance.

That's the very nature of a troll. There was no need to bother reading the rest of them. Perhaps you are in a clinic as a recovering drug/alcohol/ sex or a mental breakdown or a psychopath with the access to computer, who knows or who cares. 
Perhaps it has been therapeutic for you to write the ??professor stuff??, was clever from your doctor to recommend creativity, employing your fantasy etc. ; same as for some people it works well while playing with crayons.
That's good.
Perhaps it's quite healthy for you as well to squeeze out every bit of stored memories somewhere in your brain and exercise- exercise, such as remembering Woody Allen films etc. Please, just try to keep it shorter and perhaps we will be entertained. Your doctor must see how hard you have tried, but then again this is what he has been paid for. On the other hand, why should your doctor be punishing us --- the lovely HBO forum crowd, being here for a long time, having had many wars and battles with troll invasions and the crazies, you tell him/her that ? you need to keep it short, write haiku.
Get well, and remember, it's not good to dress up in your doctors white coat pretending to be one, while in treatment. You can get caught and as a consequence spend even more time behind the doors without a knob.

Back to KD's Claim 

Leave aside Lucas’s and n1984’s and 4Bee’s silly shallow fluff.  On that score, you’re right.   Concentrate instead on what you said in reply to Lucas, and especially on your key point --- all that stuff about not taking fictional characters seriously ---

Nothing, when you get down to it, I regret to say, could be more wrongheaded . . . and for a couple of solid reasons.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

What, a New Series Begins Already?

Yes, Already --- But Not To Worry.  Because, You See . . .

 Prof bug’s unfinished series on Libertarian thought --- what it is and what its strengths and weaknesses are: especially in the international realm --- will continue in a few days, its 5^th and last installment already written and in need only of a little more single-minded reflection and donkey-work to be brought to fruition and published here.  

In the meantime, current buggy visitors, you need to shift mental course and zero in on a radically different topic . . . not just today, but for a couple of weeks or more.  It has nothing to do with politics or economic, this new topic --- not by a stretch; rather, with an edgy, emotion-pounding TV-drama of head-spinning creativity . . .  a crackling psychological thriller, if you want, which has nothing to do with what many of you first imagine when you see or hear the word thriller evoked. 

With what then?

With a Remarkably Brilliant TV Drama-Series, Most Likely the Greatest in TV History

An exaggeration?  Not in prof bug’s view. 

Produced by HBO, In Treatment is the title of this glittering artistic achievement . . . in a dozen different ways, and maybe more than that, an extraordinary breakthrough in dramatic creativity on television.  Yes, anywhere.  Well, to be more exact . . . in the USA and Britain, the two countries that consistently produce the best televised drama, and most likely, too, elsewhere in Europe.  There’s one exception: Israel --- where the original series on which In Treatment is based first appeared a year or two ago, with the entire Israeli nation, it has been reported, glued to their TV sets through each of its emotion-blasting episodes. 

Does that detract from HBO’s artistic triumph? 

Not much, if at all.  In its setting, its strikingly sharp idiomatic language, and its startling ability to capture the inner strife and self-deceptions of 8 complex, wholly believable, up-to-date Americans, In Treatment has been thoroughly Americanized.  Then, too, several of its gripping episodes are entirely original, the creation of the American writing team --- as are the brio and stunning virtuoso acting and direction.  For that matter, none of the actors or the two directors watched any of the Israeli series, and quite simply because they didn’t want to start preparing their demanding character-roles with any preconceived notions of what their Israeli predecessors had done. 

Nor is that all.  

In the movie industry, it’s not at all uncommon for Hollywood to take a book --- say, James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, something of a confused, half-mangled classic ---and turn it into a much better shaped story and produce a brilliant classic film, the 1936 version with Gary Cooper.  Fifty six years later, Michael Mann then wrote and shot an ever better film, based on the 1936 version, with the result that it stands out as one of the three or four greatest and most enduring of “western” films . . . always remembering here that the western frontier in those days of the French-and-Indian wars of the 1750s the Hudson River. 

The same comments apply to several films that have adapted and improved on the original theatrical dramas, not to mention making them live on into the future thanks to DVD's. 

A recent book-length study of the two mediums argues ---  American Drama in the Age of Film the name of the book --- puts the fruitful, cross-fertilizing interchange between them this way (according to the publisher's blurb): Zander Brietzke (the author) . . .  

"examines the strengths and weaknesses of both the dramatic and cinematic arts to confront the standard arguments in the film-versus-theater debate. Using widely known adaptations of ten major plays, Brietzke seeks to highlight the inherent powers of each medium and draw conclusions not just about how they differ, but how they ought to differ as well. He contrasts both stage and film productions of, among other works, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Sam Shepard's True West, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Margaret Edson's Wit, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. In reading the dual productions of these works, Brietzke finds that cinema has indeed stolen much of theater's former thunder, by making drama more intimate, and visceral than most live events."  

So what can we conclude?

Easy enough to say.  However much In Treatment has been inspired and adapted from the Israeli series, it is a huge artistic triumph in its own right --- and not just in TV drama.  Most likely, too, it will be the version shown elsewhere in the world, and the one remembered by its devotees.

The Plot-Line, The Characters, and The Cast of Actors

On HBO’s web-site you’ll find terse summaries of the In Treatment’s plot --- to the extent it has one in a conventional sense --- along with photos of the main character-actors, some eight in all, brief bios and, particularly useful, two-minute clips featuring each of those characters.