Couch Canyon

COUCH CANYON is a stylish drama series that looks behind the scenes at Hollywood psychotherapy in the wild days of the 1970s. Focusing on five shrinks who work in the same building on Bedford Drive (aka “Couch Canyon”), it explores their often inappropriate relationships with their famous and privileged patients, as well as the hang-ups, complexes and ambitions that led them to pursue careers in clinical psychology in the first place. Hollywood has been in love with the practice of psychology since the earliest days of the movie industry, which makes sense given its mix of fragile egos, high financial stakes, and sensitive artists. But in the 1970s, the social phenomena that had rocked the nation in the 60s — free love, self-realization, women’s liberation, psychedelic drug use, etc.— turned the Los Angeles psychotherapy scene upside-down. Traditional analysis started falling out of favor as encounter sessions, group gropes, primal scream, EST, Gestalt therapy, consciousness-raising, and psychedelic treatments took over. Never before had boundaries between patient and doctor been so blurred, and along with traditional therapists who modified their practices to stay current, hucksters and charlatans — many with no formal training — assumed positions of tremendous influence at the highest levels of Hollywood society. L.A. became a center of the most radical, daring, and sometimes dangerous new schools of psychological treatment. Unlike the 1960s, a decade that inspired nostalgia almost before it ended, the 1970s are remembered more as an era of disappointment, disillusionment and divisiveness. The Vietnam war was given up as unwinnable; an unpopular, isolated President lied and lashed out to avoid impeachment; and Americans were politically polarized in a way that we haven’t seen until — well, until today. In fact, so many parallels can be drawn between that decade and the Trump era that modern viewers of COUCH CANYON will surely look beyond the puka necklaces and bell bottoms and see themselves. And at the same time, they will come to recognize how many of today’s cultural movements, from wellness to #metoo to #BLM, have roots in the struggles of the 1970s. Although the series deals with serious issues, including suicides, child abuse, mental illness, sexual harassment, illicit drug use, etc., its overall tone is more wry than grim, in keeping with the image of Los Angeles as a sunny dream factory whose seamier side remains mostly hidden. We see COUCH CANYON being to Los Angeles psychotherapy in the 1970s what MAD MEN was to New York advertising in the 1960s.