If you’ve seen Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, then you’ll know what to expect emotionally from watching Love.  Much like in that genre-bender action-comedy-romance, Love is a show designed to get you rooting for two people to turn their lusty chemical spark into a bonfire of romance.  By the end of Love’s first season, and particularly its last scene, I felt the same way about Love protagonists Mickey and Gus as I did about Scott Pilgrim and his paramour Ramona – I give ‘em about 6 months.  Here’s two people who are surrounded by better options – the tattoo lady from episode 5 for Gus, solitude for Mickey – but keep choosing the ongoing emotional disaster of being in relationship with each other.

When acting as a therapist, there’s a lot of theory behind how much to reveal about yourself to a client, and when.  Books and books worth of theory, really, but the gist of it is: just a little, and not too often.  Seeing as I’m writing about House of Cardsthis week, though, I think now might be an acceptable time to mug for the audience.  I think of myself as a pretty empathetic therapist – the bulk of my training was in how to relate to people, particularly their most difficult emotions – and I cannot relate to the characters in House of Cards.  Watching this show brings up for me precisely that feeling of when you get out of a bath and realize you need to take a shower.

The important thing to remind yourself of when watching Togetherness is that these people aren’t broken.  They’re assholes, the lot of them, but they’re not broken.  Admittedly, the thought “these people are broken” does pops up frequently when I watch this show, but that’s just my mind trying to distract me from how painful it is even to watch their lives from afar.  They even think they are, remember Tina’s “I’m dead inside” pep talk, but the truth is a lot more simple.  The truth is that they’re just regular people in terrible pain who are out of ideas on what to do about that.