Web Therapy: The Complete First Season

It takes a bit to warm up to Lisa Kudrow's Fiona Wallice, but once you do, you'll want to up your sessions. Fiona is even more self-deluded than Kudrow's inspired creation Valerie Cherish from the underseen The Comeback. Web Therapy originated as three-minute webisodes, but this Showtime series fleshes out the one-joke premise. With a patrician accent that drips with entitlement, Fiona is determined to launch a new “modality”: three-minute therapy sessions conducted via web chat through a computer (so much more effective, she reasons, than 50-minute sessions with all that wasted talk about dreams and such). One obstacle: she's completely untrained. Another: she's having a hard time lining up backers. Her husband (Victor Garber) is skeptical and underwhelmed, and her neglectful mother (an Emmy-worthy Lily Tomlin) is similarly unimpressed. But there is a certain integrity to Fiona's increasingly desperate attempts to maneuver and manipulate people in order to stay afloat. Guest stars include Courteney Cox, Jane Lynch, Alan Cumming, and Rashida Jones. At once hilarious and cringe-worthy (and featuring a seamless ensemble), Web Therapy is, in the final analysis, exemplary discomfort television. Presenting all 10 episodes from the 2011 first season, extras include episode commentaries, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and outtakes. Highly recommended. (D. Liebenson)