Naomi Watts plays Jean, a wife and mother who works as a therapist and seems to have a good life. She and her husband, Michael, played by Billy Crudup, live in a large and lovely suburban home with their daughter, Dolly, who is struggling with some gender issues (well, she's not struggling - she thinks of herself as a boy and is happy that way, but everyone around her is struggling with it!). Jean commutes into NYC on the train and works as a therapist, in private practice but consulting with a small group of other therapists. Michael also works in the city as a lawyer, and he and Jean seem to have a decent relationship.
What Michael doesn't know is that Jean makes a habit of lying and sneaking around and getting WAY too involved in her patients' lives. In the first episode, we see her meet with her patient, Sam, a youngish man who is having trouble getting over his ex-girlfriend, Sidney. He mentions that Sidney is a barista at a nearby coffee shop, and soon Jean is hanging out at the coffee shop, introducing herself to Sidney as Diane and befriending her, though it seems that Sidney may be interested in "Diane" as more than just as a friend. Remember, this is Jean's patient's ex-girlfriend! Another patient, Claire, played by Brenda Vacarro, is estranged from her grown daughter, and before long, Jean is seeking out the daughter to see their relationship from her perspective. She just can't seem to stop from inserting herself - secretly - into her patients' lives. Interestingly, Jean actually seems like a decent therapist - caring, thoughtful, and often helpful - though you know her creepy habits can't end well.
As Jean follows various people or meets up with Sidney or Claire's daughter or other people related to patients, she has to keep lying to her husband, her friends, and her co-workers to cover her tracks. In Sidney's case, since Jean is kind of attracted to the younger woman and enjoys stepping into her alter ego, Diane, that she created, these lies and secret running around (often in the middle of the night) become more and more convoluted.
Gypsy (Stevie Nicks recorded an acoustic version of the iconic song for the show's theme) has an unusual tone. It's a drama - sometimes about Jean and her family, sometimes about her patients - but it has a dark, slightly creepy undertone. The more that Jean lies and the more deeply she gets involved with her (unwitting) patients' lives, the more tension builds, as it seems inevitable that she will get caught out sooner or later. Sometimes, what she's doing seems downright dangerous, as with Sidney's alluring and manipulative advances, or visiting a patient who lives in a bad part of town with an abusive boyfriend. So, although I wouldn't call it a thriller, there is a growing feeling of suspense and dread. You want to keep watching to find out what happens, even as you feel an urge to cover your eyes or yell at Jean to watch out! Naomi Watts is brilliant as Jean, switching to these different personas she adopts when she's pretending to be someone else and capturing Jean's underlying feelings of discontent beneath her normal-seeming exterior.
We have watched six of Gypsy's ten episodes in its first season. As a Netflix original show, it is available exclusively on Netflix.
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