About the only thing weirder than the fact that Lisa Kudrow has taken to the Internet for her new web series “Web Therapy” is that it is on a site promoted through Lexus, of all places. Not the Lexis of data warehousing fame but actually Lexus, the luxury automotive division of toyota.

Don’t call it a comeback though because Lisa Kudrow has never left us. No, in fact there have been more than a few movie roles most notably Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Wonderland . There have been some serious television appearances too such as The Comeback, which she produced and co-created.

So why is Web Therapy so interesting you may ask. Imagine Pheobe as someone who really, really, wants to cut it as a therapist but doesn’t really have it all together to help anyone else because of her own issues that she is dealing with. Then imagine seeing Lisa Kudrow expanding upon the humor she had established on Friends but with the feeling of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ to it, except that unlike Larry David, she has no clue just how rude, unfeeling, and self-absorbed she really is through a character known only as Fiona Wallace.

The episodes are broken down into 3 shorts typically between 4 and 8 minutes. Instead of the single camera narrative you’re peering out into cyberspace and looking at two people talking to each other through their webcams, sort of how panelists on cable news programs look at the camera and argue with each other. People leave the camera without excusing themselves first, one woman threatens to track down her ip address and stalk her, her old flame, Richard, logs in only to realize that she can’t help him because she is obsessed about his attraction to her, but he was really logging onto help someone else at work.

The running joke is how, with each client, Fiona stresses her reason for preferring to meet with people via webcam as opposed to actually sitting down with them in her office for an hour. The explanation is unusually self-absorbed and narcisstic, and has little if anything to do with truly wanting to help the patients. Usually her patients are telling her how full of herself she is in the first few minutes, yet continue to talk to her out of some morbid curiousity as to both what she is going to say or perhaps there is some semblance of truth in all of this madness. Nothing ever gets resolved, and the underlying point seems to be that not so much that you can’t rush therapy, but that nothing is going to get resolved in a few sessions, regardless of the length.  If you don’t have anything of interest to Fiona, she doesn’t want to help you at all; true to human behavior but totally out of line for a liscensed therapist. 

This is probably a bit more humorous if you have actually been in therapy and things turned sour early on. It can be a bit wrong, of which the Internet is the perfect place to try out that type of entertainment; for example on the second installment of her sessions with her ex co-worker she starts throwing herself at him only because he has moved on and is actually happy with his current girlfriend. But of course she doesn’t really want him, just under her thumb, that’s all.  In the last installment with Richard we find out that he thinks that he loves Fiona and wants to break off his engagement with his girlfriend (the “friend” at work he was logging on for), as she has successfully brought about transference. 

This has the potential to really take off, but they have to move the series to somewhere people would actually watch it, like Hulu or YouTube. Keeping it on the Lexus website, that you will only visit if you come across one of the ads is unusually poor product placement considering that few even know that Lexus is in the business of creating Internet content for anything other than selling their vehicles. The real joke is that a bad therapist is going to do everything in their power to both manipulate their patients and exorcise themselves through the sessions, if you can find the humor in that. Yet the joke may be on Lisa Kudrow herself if this show doesn’t find a wider audience. This series is cathardic in strange ways, like I was stressed but after enjoying the odd humor on this show I’m doing alright.