In a way, movies are like parents. Great film storytelling engages the imagination, evokes our empathy, urges us to ask the right questions and to be patient while waiting for the answers. A bond of trust develops between a movie and its viewer, one that suggests that the storyteller wants the best for us, won’t punish us unreasonably, and will return our attention and devotion. When it comes to television, we’re the parents. We give TV a home and a place to sit, tell it when to speak and when to be silent, and are grateful enough for its company that we overlook inarticulateness, fibs, and flat-out dishonesty. In return, TV doesn’t care if we’re only half-listening as it babbles away. Dramatic TV processes raw narrative and character into a familiar product of questionable wholesomeness but latent addictiveness that induces habitual, not voluntary, loyalty.

At its best, HBO has used its dramatic series “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood,” and “The Wire,” to fuse the authoritative parental story-voice of film with the habit-forming familiarity of TV. The network’s short seasons of intelligent, emotionally honest, and confidently people-powered stories pitched to the TV addict’s need for a regular shot of the familiar are the equivalent of character crack.

Beginning tonight, the network returns with “In Treatment,” which, at 30 minutes an episode, five nights a week for nine weeks, radically adjusts the dosage of HBO’s previous signature seasons. It’s a pity it doesn’t match their potency. But such has been the recent trajectory at HBO, which has caused growing unease with its last few attempts to hook its audience on drama. The arid world of “Tell Me You Love Me” was populated by nattering, codependent pests, not people, and the less said of the conceptual train wreck “John From Cincinnati,” the better.

Adapted from a highly successful Israeli television series, “In Treatment” offers Paul (Gabriel Byrne), a successful married therapist facing a different scheduled patient each day. Mondays are with Laura (Melissa George), a gorgeous young doctor who lays her relationship problems and then herself at Paul’s feet. Arrogant, dissociated Navy fighter ace Alex (Blair Underwood) arrives on Tuesdays to work through some collateral emotional damage. Wednesdays are for Sophie (Mia Wasikowska), a 16-year-old gymnast who’s been benched due to physical injuries she may or may not have brought on herself. Rounding out the work week are Jake (Josh Charles) and Amy (Embeth Davidtz) a shrill, mismatched yuppie couple battling over how much to enlarge their family and extend their marriage. Finally on Fridays, Paul becomes the patient and visits Gina (Dianne Wiest), his former supervisor, to whom he goes in search of counsel for his own bruised feelings.

Confined to a handful of sets and shot in every conceivable variation on the close-up, “In Treatment” is the film-production embodiment of the adage, “talk is cheap.” The show’s producers ( “Six Feet Under” and indie gab-fest directing vet Rodrigo Garcia, “Entourage” production topliners Stephen Levinson and Mark Wahlberg, and Hagai Levi, creator of the Israeli original) have spent the money they saved on not re-creating ancient Rome on their cast. Mr. Byrne ably lends his facility for communicating masculine vanity and unease to Paul, a man eventually exposed as being so close to a midlife meltdown that he ought to be shrouded in lead. Ms. Wiest, Mr. Underwood, and especially the dusky-voiced Ms. George essay their roles in what is by and large a nightly two-person one-act play with an emphasis on diction and vocal presence.

The problem with “In Treatment” is not how the performers say what they have to say — it’s what they’ve been given to work with. Sophie expresses herself in such an unrelenting barrage of teen-speak that it borders on parody. The convolutions through which the show’s writers put Alex in order to justify his seeking civilian counseling reveal a profound disinterest in researching this character’s high-stress occupation past a junior-high-school career-day level of superficiality. Ditto Laura, an anesthesiologist who, in four weeks of sessions, barely even mentions her job.

This all may sound a bit petty, but these gaps in story craft and logic are many and add up quickly. Before long, “In Treatment” stops being habit-forming and becomes mind-numbing. Complications are downgraded to coincidences, and, as Paul begins to unravel personally and professionally, rather than reach for something strong and vibrant beyond all the self-conscious talk, “In Treatment” slips into melodrama.

By rights, the show should have taken the latter-day cliché of “the helper who needs help” somewhere it’s never gone, as “The Sopranos” did with crime family intrigue, “Deadwood” did with a frontier community western, and “The Wire” continues to do with the police procedural. Instead, the writers of “In Treatment” are content to play out weeks of conflicts with a soap-opera emphasis on contrived, “Oh no he didn’t!” revelations and an increasing disregard for the sort of subtle, personal character details and individually defining vocabulary that makes for rich drama and has helped place HBO’s sturdy, crafty, trustworthy, and grown-up storytelling at the front of the small-screen pack.