Instant Favorite.

Good concept, poorly executed.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Dani Santino (Callie Thorne) is a suburban mom who is picking up the pieces of her life. She's divorcing her cheating husband. Her teenage kids (Hannah Marks, Patrick Johnson) are becoming a handful. A professional football team is having trouble with their wide receiver TK (Mehcad Brooks) and they call in the suburban psychotherapist to help. There's the hot trainer Matthew Donnally (Marc Blucas) and the mysterious fixer Nico Careles (Scott Cohen) on the team.I like most of the characters even the standard annoying teenage kids. I like the love triangle they set up. I really like TK. The first two seasons is basically a serial where Dani works on TK and everything else as well as a procedural where Dani treats a new client every week. There are a lot of changes in the third season. The football team is sidelines when she's fired from the team. The family is gone when the kids leave. The love triangle is gone. Only TK and Nico remain while they add John Stamos as the sports agent guru Connor McClane. It's an understandable Hail Mary to revitalize a borderline show but it's ultimately a failure. The last season is cut to only 10 episodes. It was a nice show before the change. It wasn't a bad show after the change either. It just lost too many characters that the fans care about.

Before I watched the new season I had started to wonder if I would just drop the show from my watch list. I was pleasantly surprised with the direction. I hope they will continue to move away from the emotional mellow drama of the Doctor's bad choices in men. I love John Stamos in the new role and I am glad he has opportunity to shine. The shiny new office with a google like feel to the company setup is a welcomed change from the work at home environment. It may be more realistic to have a work at home shrink with an erratic life but I want entertainment not reality. The new job and expanded characters should allow the show to offer new directions and interesting scenario.

Necessary Roughness is a show about an experienced psychiatrist played by Callie Thorne(from Homicide: LOTS and Rescue Me fame) who gets hired to help out the fictional New York Hawks football team to help out with their star wide receiver Terrence "TK" King. Along the way she is also seen helping out other people with their own neurosis. The story of the show also involves the lives of Thorne's characters life especially about her kids. It's actually a quite well thought out show with a lot more depth then you'd expect from a show you'd expect about football. Also the show gives you a lot of behind the scenes perspective of what it's like to run a football team.

Pleasant if fundamentally flawed show. The basic problem with this show is that tries to combine the blue sky appeal of other USA network shows while combining sometimes serious psychotherapy. As a result, the show has serious tonal issues and ends up not being very good at either. However, the show manages to still be moderately enjoyable because of one reason: casting. I feel that in television (not so much in movies unless it's a romantic comedy), casting talented actors and having sympathetic characters can go a long way and can forgive a multitude of sins. Army Wives in particular is a great example of this (and has a more talented cast than this show), but this show really works well at the top because of Callie Thorne's magnetic star quality and excellent counterbalancing from supporting players Mehcad Brooks and Scott Cohen. They help make this show more than the sum of it's parts, if not quite enough to make this a "good" show. Even so, it's not have bad as escapist entertainment.