The lead character, a recently widowed psychotherapist named Alan, wakes in bed as if emerging from a troubling dream. It quickly becomes clear that the nightmare persists: Alan is shackled to a bed in an unknown basement and discovers that one of his disturbed patients has been seized as a hostage.
The same patient, Sam, returns to a role echoing a past killer part, offering a remorseful apology yet insisting that, despite the absurdity of the situation, Alan will stay put. Sam needs therapy to curb a bloodthirsty impulse to kill, and this demand sets in motion a restrained yet perilous dynamic.
Thus begins a ten-episode on-screen duel between two seasoned actors and their protagonists. They are starkly different in appearance and temperament, yet they glimpse unsettling reflections of their own souls in each other.
If the pilot, which places guns on the walls of Alan’s dungeon to be used later, promises intrigue, the tension begins to thin as the series presses forward and the ambition overshadows the narrative. The format itself frays the storytelling. The writers lean into an unusual pacing, with episodes capped at roughly 25 minutes. The energy and tempo inside each installment feel overinhibited, turning the rhythm into a test of patience for the audience.
Between those compact runtimes, the show edges toward a few twists that land only intermittently, never quite satisfying a craving for sustained momentum. In essence, the format aims for a sense of growth, yet the compact screen time makes the emotional arcs feel crowded and hurried, leaving viewers wanting a broader canvas to breathe within the story world.
There is a real irony in the attempt to prove that brevity serves this tale. Chronology becomes a limitation, forcing the writers to be concise while the core idea calls for a broader, more expansive exploration. In this series the clock often wins, and the question of when a session ends hangs in the air like an unanswered question.
The performances carry much of the weight, with Carell and Gleason delivering a compelling, even surprising, pairing. Their chemistry grounds the show as the characters maneuver in a space thick with ambiguity. Yet the character development feels leached of a sharper throughline. Sam’s duplicity remains intriguing, a pathological liar who pleads for help while resisting complete honesty. That tension pushes Alan to probe his captor’s mind, risking a slide toward complicity with the man he hopes to reform rather than a clean breakthrough.
Alan’s journey unfolds within a narrative framework that fractures the present from the past. Memory becomes the only escape hatch from confinement, and the structure uses flashbacks to reveal the strains of the couple’s history. In these memories, his wife Beth endures, and his son Ezra, who later embraces Orthodox faith, honors family ties and tradition in ways that echo the broader themes of duty and consequence. The writers seem to draw a parallel between Sam’s troubled history and Alan’s attempts to bridge a painful divide with his son, offering a provocative, though not entirely convincing, thematic resonance.
Still, the show struggles to transform its premise into a fully realized therapeutic journey. The potential remains untapped, and the overall experience feels more like a clinical session that promises relief but delivers only partial results. The tension between intention and execution lingers, as the series tries to balance sharp dialogue, ethical ambiguities, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of confinement, yet too often settles for a series of brief, perhaps promising, moments that do not coalesce into a confident whole.