Mondays: Melissa George is Laura, who's in love with therapist Paul (Gabriel Byrne) -- or thinks she is, though it's probably erotic transference. Her kind of desperate flirting, and Paul's anxiety in the face of it, are cringey to watch, but I would be more engrossed in it if I wasn't always so distracted by George's GIANT TEETH. She can barely close her lips over them! It's crazy!

Tuesdays: Blair Underwood is Alex, a navy pilot who was given orders, based on bad intelligence, to bomb a site in Iraq that ended up being a school, with sixteen children inside. Alex's hard-assed exterior belies the fact that he can't make decisions on his own behalf, and is using Paul to bounce things off so he doesn't have to take responsibility for himself. He...is seriously messed up; it'll be really interesting to see how his storyline unravels.

Wednesdays: Mia Wasikowska is Sophie, a sixteen-year-old Olympic-hopeful gymnast who "accidentally" rode her bike out into traffic and broke both her arms. She also seems to be sleeping with her coach. She's hard to watch because she's so young and so needy, but trying to appear so invulnerable.

Thursday: Josh Charles and Embeth Davidtz are Jake and Amy, a troubled couple who seriously just need to break up. They've been my favourites so far (though their second episode doesn't air until tonight), maybe just because having two people to interact with Paul instead of just one transforms the dramatic stakes.

Friday: This is when Paul goes to see a therapist himself -- his now-retired former mentor Gina (Dianne Wiest). The two had some falling-out years ago, the nature of which hasn't been revealed yet, but which was gruesome enough that Paul didn't go to Gina's husband's funeral. In the first Friday episode, Paul says he wanted to see Gina because he's feeling exhausted by his practice and so forth, but she probes until he gets to problems he's been having with his wife, and his own guilty feelings about (or secret interest in) Laura. Gina is so different from other kind of simpery characters Wiest has played: she's tough on Paul, and it's fascinating to see him resist her the same way his patients resist him.

Ultimately, for me, the appeal of the show lies in the sensation of spying on people in their most intimate moments. It's almost enough to make me want to watch Celebrity Rehab too.