Lisa Kudrow’s Fiona Wallice in “Web Therapy” isn’t someone with whom you’d want to be friends.
“This Fiona Wallace is narcissistic in the book; she’s self-absorbed,” book editor Maxine DeMaine (Rosie O’Donnell) tells Fiona, talking about the main character in Fiona’s manuscript. “She has, um, really an unsympathetic view of everyone except herself. I found spiritually her to be lacking. There is no real moral center to this woman and she’s uninteresting.”
The real Fiona is all those things, but most definitely not uninteresting. And most importantly, she’s hilarious. So is the Showtime comedy, which begins its second season at 10 p.m. July 2 (3.5 stars out of 4).
Kudrow reprises her role as Fiona, an abrasive psychotherapist who invented 3-minute online sessions simply because she does not care enough about other people’s problems to sit in the same room with them for a real session. Created by Kudrow, Don Roos and Dan Bucatinsky, the show is filmed as a series of Skype conversations between Fiona and her patients or other people in her life.
It’s mostly improvised, which makes the funny exchanges between Kudrow and her guest stars even more impressive.
As the new season begins, Fiona and her husband, Kip (Victor Garber), are advised buy her trusted friend and the backer of his Senate campaign, Austen Clarke (Alan Cumming), to ship Kip off to a sexual reorientation center to “get straightened out, so to speak,” as Fiona says.
“A lot of Republicans go,” Austen tells them. “It’s practically like a Republican enclave.”
Meanwhile, Fiona heads to New York to stay with her flirty pal Austen and work on her book with Maxine. While there, she takes a disturbing call from Kip’s counselor, Camilla Bowner (Meryl Streep), who has a radical idea to jumpstart Kip’s recovery. I won’t tell more, but insist to watch the episode to the end of the credits to see some funny outtakes with Streep.
Other guest stars this season include Kudrow’s “Friends” co-star, David Schwimmer, along with Minnie Driver, Selma Blair and Conan O’Brien, who will play himself, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays Shevaun Haig, Fiona’s legit therapist sister.
Shevaun makes Fiona want to be a better person, but thankfully, only for a minute or two.
