“The Americans,” Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s previous show for FX, built tension according to a methodical pace. Its pleasures lay in a rigorous willingness to delay catharsis; Fields and Weisberg’s team of writers seemed actively to resist giving viewers quick and easy satisfaction, preferring to build scenes, episodes and arcs that stretched out according to their own rhythms.

And their follow-up series, “The Patient,” an FX production airing exclusively on Hulu, suggests that success has prompted them to lean so far into this method that they’ve lost balance. A languorous 10 episodes (granted, only half an hour apiece) are spent telling a story that might have, in another era, made for a tidy 90-minute movie. The collision of Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson as, respectively, a therapist and the subject who kidnaps him, seems so hopelessly insoluble — with Gleeson’s character demanding a cure for his beyond-repair psyche — that many viewers will likely give up before they reach the end.

Carell plays Alan Strauss, a widower who exists in a multitude of griefs. He misses his late wife (played in flashback by Laura Niemi), and though his family draws spiritual and cultural solace from Judaism, he struggles to understand his son, Ezra (Andrew Leeds), taking a turn toward what’s depicted as a restrictive orthodoxy. Into his life stumbles Gleeson’s Sam Fortner, a marginal personality who expresses in physical violence what he cannot in his relationships with others. Sam abducts Alan and chains him in his basement; in this bizarre and isolated setting, Sam’s thinking goes, the work of therapy can truly begin, and he can leave behind the urge to kill.

Alan is right to believe that this obviously cannot work, and yet it’s the situation he’s in. And what appears at first like a canny creative choice by Fields and Weisberg becomes an element holding the series itself hostage. The action of “The Patient” is determined by an erratic thinker who cannot be made to see reason; the story beats have the same recursive, spiraling quality. Carell is a fine actor, and Alan’s exasperation and fright are notes he’s equipped to play well, but we can watch him plead in the same way for only so long.

Which is why imagined ventures out of Sam’s basement feel so welcome. Alan fantasizes about seeing his own therapist (David Alan Grier); in these internal sessions, he works toward the reconciliation with his son that he fears he won’t live to experience. And his interactions with Sam’s mother and housemate, Candace (Linda Emond), at least add a new note to a narrowly focused show, even as the mother-son relationship lacks the texture that would give it credibility. Candace is plainly abetting her son’s murders and kidnapping, and yet doesn’t really have any opinion about why she’s doing it.

The answer we bring ourselves to is that she’s afraid of Sam, just as Alan is; this, too, feels like the show imposing a set of facts that don’t quite fit. Alan so often repeats that he is too physically weak to confront Sam that it becomes a sort of incantation, as if to make us believe it; Gleeson, who has been genuinely frightening in films like “Mother!,” seems to be keeping something back from us here, as though he has an idea of Sam that he’s holding in reserve and never reveals. As written, Sam is isolated from himself and only comfortable when indulging his inclination toward crime; Gleeson’s performance accurately conveys a sense of this emptiness, so much so that it raises further questions. We learn, for instance, that Sam is divorced, but the fact of his having been married at all doesn’t make much sense.

That’s the challenge of Fields and Weisberg forcing their show to play so completely by Sam’s rules; we’re left with little to contemplate but a figure whose story doesn’t come together, in ways that are more frustrating than complicating. He’s a force interrupting the life of Alan more than he is a character. That interruption means that the real action of “The Patient” — Alan reckoning with his broken relationship with his son — must happen inside his mind.

This isn’t, on its face, a less-than-valid manner of telling that story! But Fields and Weisberg owe viewers something compelling if they’re going to play out a relationship entirely in retrospect, with little apparent possibility for development. Instead, aspects of the Alan-Ezra subplot — like the nuanced distinction between the Strauss family’s humanistic view of Judaism and Ezra’s rigid religious practice — come off undernourished, stated but left unelaborated as we return to the basement and the chain.

Fields and Weisberg are plainly very talented writers; a less ambitious pair would not have attempted to explore a character and the manifold issues of his life in a single location. (I was put in mind, at moments, of “The Mezzanine,” the Nicholson Baker novel in which we examine a man’s entire life during a single escalator ride.) But “The Patient” doesn’t put their skills to best advantage. “The Americans” toyed with our patience. But there, the creators also had a charming, dark sense of humor and an appetite for the salacious, seductive feeling of being thrilled. Slowly but surely, viewers of “The Patient” will realize just how aggressively committed the writers are to playing it straight.

The first two episodes of “The Patient” will launch on Hulu on Tuesday, August 30, with new episodes to follow weekly.