Therapeutic sessions mob the airwaves

The lie of TV psychotherapy is that impasses are about to be broken before our very eyes; the tele-breakthrough has supplanted televangelism. The truth in therapy is harder to dramatize, for it so often involves stasis, both emotional and physical; you come into the shrink’s office week after week after week and listen to yourself think and feel aloud.

Sometimes too you make the shrink laugh. It happened Sunday on “The Sopranos,” when Tony (James Gandolfini) tells Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) about an amusement ride accident at the annual Feast of St. Elzear street fair, saying the mishap occurred because no one was minding the ride, only Elzear, “but he was so busy getting money pinned to his [butt] that he got distracted and the bolt snapped.”

It was a rare moment of levity in their therapy relationship. For every impulsive, id-driven plot point on “The Sopranos,” there is the counter-world of Melfi’s office, where Tony, forced to freeze-frame his week, his life, fidgets in a chair that seems, appropriately, hardly big enough to contain his body, much less his restless spirit (in these scenes, Gandolfini’s body language is like a separate conversation happening).

It’s what makes the Tony-Melfi interludes, in which neither of the character moves, so fluid and so believable.

“Could you just give me some practical advice? For once,” Tony implored Melfi the other week on the impasse subject of his wayward, layabout son, A.J.

Most TV shows that delve into therapy (and they’ve popped up like weeds, mostly as places of intimacy invaded for sport on reality shows) mimic Tony’s knee-jerk lament: Just give me some practical advice.

The genre has produced Dr. Phil’s syndicated tough love but also elevated Larry King to idiot savant in the therapeutic technique of reflecting -- King retained by the celebrity class for moments of PR intervention.

On TLC’s “Shalom in the Home,” Oxford-educated, bestselling Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach does house calls, dispensing marriage and parenting advice.

He arrives pulling his camera-equipped office, an Airstream trailer, gets to the heart of the matter, dispenses his advice and leaves. It all happens very fast, in the blink of an episode, giving new meaning to the phrase: Are we there yet?

The very nature of an impasse problem suggests you’re better off if your shrink isn’t traipsing the country like Nicholson or Hopper in “Easy Rider.” Better, even, that he be sitting there secretly doodling, like the therapist Dr. Katz on the late Comedy Central series “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist.”

Dr. Katz is a therapist like Melfi in the sense that he’s really not about MapQuesting to an “aha” moment so much as to the longer road toward the day you notice you’re coping better.

The first season of this quirky animated series, which ran on Comedy Central in a more experimental -- and lower-budget -- epoch, from 1995 to 2000, is being released on DVD today.

The voice of Dr. Katz is Jonathan Katz, a droll comedian who seems to have intuitively understood that psychotherapy, like stand-up comedy, is a riff.

Except in therapy the equation is reversed; the shrink plays the audience and it is also the shrink who gets paid.

Patients on “Dr. Katz” are actual comedians doing their actual bits -- a nice showcase for a comic, back in the day, and a canny evocation of how so many of us use shtick as a coping mechanism.

Here, though, they’re professionals like Ray Romano and Dom Irrera, who, when asked by Dr. Katz whether his parents got along, says: “My father, God bless him, never cheated on my mother. He used to cheat on me. He used to pick up other kids after school and take them to the zoo, take them to play ball.”

Well, it is a comedy show.

On the DVD extras, Katz talks about how the show’s first season was made in the pantry of Tom Snyder’s house in Watertown, Mass. Snyder was the show’s co-creator and inventor of Squigglevision, an animation technique in which the outlines of a character vibrate and undulate in what is for the most part a static image. The style is admittedly somewhat headache-making, but also an amusing way to animate the world of the isolated neurotic.

On “The Sopranos,” the implied squiggles on the margins of Tony Soprano indicate his self-delusion.

“It’s just a matter of time before he totally decompensates,” Melfi tells her own therapist about “patient Soprano,” referring to Tony’s having been shot by his demented uncle.

And so the laugh about the amusement-park ride accident is, ultimately, a way for Melfi to put on her pith helmet and burrow in, once more. “They pay money so they can almost puke,” Tony says of people who go on amusement park rides.

“Why do you think that is?” Melfi asks.

“They’re bored.”

“Are you bored?” she says after a beat.

He broods. “Am I bored? I got shot in the pancreas and I recovered,” he says finally. “No brain damage from the septic shock like everybody figured I’d have. You know my feelings. Every day is a gift. It’s just, does it have to be a pair of socks?”

She stares at him, straight-faced.

“I’m joking,” he says. “I’m joking....”