Thoughts on The Patient: Positives & Negatives from a (Mostly) Good Show

It’s pretty easy to talk about what I liked about Hulu’s ten episode limited series, The Patient, without spoiling much of the show, so I’ll discuss that, and just a few other thoughts, before delving into what I think the show could’ve done better in a shorter, later section that’ll have spoilers. I’ll clearly label before I go into any spoilers, so if you still haven’t watched The Patient, and think you might want to do so, just read on until then.

The Main Strengths of The Patient

There are two things that I think are really excellent in The Patient and the first one will be pretty obvious even after watching just a little bit of the series; it’s the acting of Steve Carrell. Carrell has starred in more dramatic material before, but he’s still definitely best known for his comedic roles, particularly that of Michael Scott on NBC’s The Office. Well, The Patient is about as far from comedy as you can get, and Carrell is fantastic in it as the show’s protagonist, Alan Strauss, a therapist being held captive and forced to treat the titular patient, a serial killer who wants his help to get better.

Carrell, who also served as an executive producer on the show, gives I think his best dramatic performance I’ve seen on The Patient, and it’s definitely worthy of awards consideration. Strauss is a complex character and Carrell really portrays him masterfully. Overall, I feel like Carrell’s performance (and the show in general) deserve a lot more credit and attention from viewers than they received. The week of its premier, the show ranked ninth in the U.S. for streaming original TV shows, behind things like She-Hulk, the HBO Max Harley Quinn cartoon series, and Netflix’s Sandman, which as that point had already been streaming for about a month.

The second thing that I think is a major strength of The Patient is the writing of series creators, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. Weisberg is best known as the showrunner and creator of the (fantastic) series, The Americans, a show that Fields also worked on with him. I think that, like they did with The Americans, the writers take interesting characters and craft believable dialogue in a way that is both extremely engaging and can really carry a show.

Though there isn’t a lot of physical “action” in the way that many thrillers have, The Patient still very much falls into the psychological thriller genre. It’s hard not to watch the show and think of 1990’s Misery, the movie based off of the Stephen King book. The fact that comparisons can justifiably be made with such a great movie is definitely high-praise.

What Keeps The Patient from Being Great (Non-spoilers)

To put it simply, the main thing that prevents The Patient from being amongst the upper echelon of recent television shows is that you have to have a good deal of suspension of disbelief, particularly as the series goes along. As we get towards the middle episodes of the show, if you think about certain things too much (which I’ll get into more in the spoilers section below), I can see how you’d have some issues with it.

Another (somewhat minor) gripe I have that doesn’t give anything away is that I feel like the series could’ve been tightened up just a little bit to be maybe seven or eight episodes instead of 10. 

Episodes also range in length from 21-46 minutes. I’m a fan of having a TV show not necessarily be the typical 40+ minutes non-comedy shows commonly are, and I think for a show that’s dialogue driven (like this one is), shorter episodes can prevent things from ever feeling boring. Still, I would’ve preferred if all the episodes were at least similar lengths as opposed to starting with a bunch of short episodes then having longer episodes towards the end of the series. Again, this isn’t a major issue though.

**SPOILERS BELOW**

I want to touch on a few of the main issues I had with the show now, which all really tie into the suspension of disbelief problem with The Patient. None of these things prevented me from overall enjoying the show, but I do think they’re all worth calling out.

How was Sam, the serial killer patient, ever married in the first place? On the show, Alan tries to get Sam to reconnect with his ex-wife, and Sam comes across as tortuously awkward and completely social inept. His wife is shown to be weird too, but there is exactly zero chemistry between them and it’s impossible to believe they were ever in a relationship. The way Sam’s character is presented, it’s pretty hard to believe that this is someone who’s ever lived in a house with someone other than his mother ever.

How does no one suspect Sam? The police are completely absent from the series. With the extremely weird and suspicious way that Sam’s portrayed though, I don’t see how he’s gone through life with a real job interacting with lots of other people and he hasn’t been reported by someone under suspicion of committing some misdeed or another. Sam is basically how you’d describe a serial killer, but no one notices his odd behavior? Even after Sam kills his boss, the police are nowhere to be found.

How is Sam, a man who looks like a strong gust of wind could knock him down, capable of killing other men with his bare hands? I can believe that Sam, who is played by Domhall Gleeson, an actor with a very slim build, is able to surprise one or two larger victims and choke them to death, but this seems to be his main method of killing. Sam just jumps on his victims and starts choking them (his boss, his father, Alan) and the victims all basically give up without struggling at all. Maybe if Sam was more physically imposing this would be more believable to me, but as we went on and this seemed to be his main method of attack, I wasn’t buying it at all.

So, Do I Recommend The Patient?

The Patient might not be the perfect show, but it’s still well done with some great acting by Carrell. There’s an entire element of the show about Alan’s family that I didn’t get into here, focusing on his struggles with his own son, and I thought that part of the show too was really good and quite emotional.

It’s very difficult to make a show or movie that holds your interest that’s largely comprised of just a couple of characters in a room talking with one another, and on that front The Patient is largely a success. If you can overlook its shortcomings and just go along for the ride (which I was mostly able to do), I definitely think this is a worthwhile show.

Grade: 7.5/10