Necessary Roughness

Une psychologue sexy de Long Island, fraîchement divorcée, intervient auprès d'une équipe de football professionnelle afin de boucler ses fins de mois. Très vite, d'autres sportifs, musiciens ou politiques viennent la voir pour qu'elle les aide à supporter les affres de la célébrité.

Saison 2:

Citation :: The Real Psychotherapist Behind ‘Necessary Roughness’

Dr. Donna Dannenfelser doesn’t coddle her patients. A psychotherapist based in Long Island, her straight-talk no-nonsense approach gave her entree to the world of professional athletes and high profile clients beginning in the 1990s. Her life and her work is the inspiration for USA Network’s newest show “Necessary Roughness.” In the series, Dannenfelser is renamed Dr. Dani Santino and played by Callie Thorne. Speakeasy phoned the fast-talking Dannenfelser to discuss her practice and what it means to be a supervising producer.

“Necessary Roughness” is based on your life as a psychotherapist, what does that mean for you?
First of all, the surreal part of this for me is having the desire to get my story out there and then witnessing hundreds of people working on a project that has been inspired by my life. I think that is the surreal part. I didn’t realize so many people would be involved in doing something like this.

How close does it resemble your personal life?
As far as how it reflects on my life, the first thing I want out there is I did not sleep my way into the NFL, my husband did not have three girlfriends and I actually have two sons and a daughter as opposed to the daughter and son in the pilot. Of course it is not a documentary but it is a reflection of my emotional journey as a working mom who is a psychotherapist dealing with professional athletes and high profiled clients and the whole time working out of my home where my teenagers were growing up. They were expected to understand the word confidentiality and teenagers, as I grew to understand, don’t really appreciate that word. So there’s the fun in that story. Naturally, all the client stories are fictional and the family stories in the pilot were massaged stories of the truth and as we go forward in the episodes they are more fictional in nature although they find the basis in the human condition that we all experience.

Are you still with your husband because in the show not only did he cheat on you but you are in the process of getting divorced?
Well I’ve been married to my husband for 34 years. My husband and I were separated for two of those years and that’s really where that whole story started. I needed to have my independence and get financially set and what was fortunate for my husband and myself, it was a mutual thing where we decided it wasn’t working, we didn’t go through that period of time a lot of couple go through where they hurt each other so badly they cant come back from it. And we were lucky that we didn’t do that and when we decided to reconcile it worked out.

How does he feel about being personified as a cheater?
He’s not happy about it. I had to tell him time and time again, “it’s just TV” and it’s so funny because we were separated and that’s how the story started and he said “we were separated for two minutes” and I said “no actually we were separated for two years.” But he gets it. If that didn’t happen maybe I wouldn’t have had the need to go out and look for something that could give me an opportunity to make money and honestly that’s what I thought I was doing. But after my first client I realized it wasn’t about the money it was about the people. And that’s when I just was brought into a world that I had no idea existed.

You worked with the Jets in the 1990s. Are you still actively practicing?
I am kind of refraining from giving years and teams I will be giving up my clients. It was during the 1990s and it wasn’t just the Jets. It is a very small world, the professional athletic world. And everybody has a friend. So what started to happen is the trainers would talk to other teams and I was getting not just football players but basketball players, baseball players, political personalities, actors, CEOs of corporations. It was just a very high profile clientele.

But you are also a supervising producer on the show. How do you split your time?
Right now I am working in the writers room Monday through Thursday to develop the story. On Fridays I do still have a small practice that I maintain.

How does your handling of professional athletes differ from that of political personalities?
What this is really about and why I wanted to tell the story in regards to high profile people is that perception is not always reality. And the show takes you inside these high profile personalities. They have the same issues that we have but it’s built up so huge because they are getting coverage. They want the same things you and I want. That’s the message here, life should not hurt. When that person walks through my door and sits on my couch, they are coming to me and they are in crisis. Because feeling same thing, treated very similarly.

How much of this show is defined by being set in Long Island? Transfer over in different place?
I think that Dr. Dani has that New York edge. If this was done in the south it would be different. My philosophy is I’m not the type that will have you come into my therapy and we are going to be really nice and soft. It’s like “come on here, lets separate the drama from the reality, look at what the issues are and let’s make some choices.” And that’s the way it was always handled.

Handling athletes rather than the regular masses, that attitude of “let’s get to the bottom line here” was something that they really attracted to. I wasn’t going to be playing with them. We didn’t have the time. In sports, you have to really move quickly to find out what’s at the root of their problem and address it. So I think that maybe the New York, long island attitude makes it quicker, talk to me, keep it real.

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» Marc Blucas dans Necessary Roughness