SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the final episode of FX’s The Patient on Hulu. The Patient — a grim limited series about psychotherapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell) who …
DEADLINE There’s a moment in the second to last episode where Sam looks at a video on YouTube of a serial killer. I’m wondering if something like that happened with you guys, which spawned this idea to begin with. Did it start with something like that?Joel Fields & Joe Weisberg Promote Caroline Moore To President of The Js Production Company As I recall, we started talking about that video, which I think Joel had seen years ago.
The series gets intensely violent, bloody and dark. We’ve all been in closed environments during the pandemic. Were you worried whether this was right subject matter for the time? I mean, the situation got so heavy that Alan was dreaming about being in a concentration camp.the right subject matter. I think on some level, the whole thing grew out of the pandemic. We were all kidnapped by something and held in our houses and unable to leave.
Did you also go back and forth about that final moment? Did you feel like you needed to give viewers a payoff, and have Sam be caught by the police?We had a lot of discussions about what we owe, what we have set up for the audience so they can have reasonable expectations and what we are going to tell them. And clearly we owed another piece of Sam’s story, but it was very complicated. We tried a lot of things and almost everything felt artificial or tacked on until we got that.
Joe Weisberg, left, and Joel Fields, right, attend FX’s “The Americans” Season 4 premiere at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, March 5, 2016, in New York.