Lodge has described how writing sketches for a stage revue helped to turn him into a comic novelist, and he has kept in touch with the medium of drama. In 1991 his play TheWriting Game, a farce set in a residential school of creative writing, was performed at the Birmingham Rep. It is television, though, that has offered him the greatest opportunities as a dramatic writer. In 1989 he adapted Nice Work as a television serial, and he has described the experience and the lessons he learnt from it in an essay, ‘Adapting Nice Work for Television’ (ANWT). Then in 1994 his adaptation of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit was broadcast by BBC2 and highly praised.

Television provided Lodge with the material and the milieu for his tenth novel, Therapy (1995), one of whose epigraphs is a remark by Graham Greene to the effect that writing is a form of therapy. The central figure and narrator, Tubby Passmore, is a very successful scriptwriter whose world suddenly falls apart when his wife leaves him. He is depressed, even shattered, but manages to survive. Tubby resembles the middle-aged heroes of many American novels, who undergo all kinds of personal, professional and sexual disasters, but who remain fiercely articulate and opinionated in the midst of everything; an English cousin of Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog, perhaps. Lodge has found a stimulating new setting in Therapy, the competitive, bitchy, insecure, but energetic and energizing world of television, and he extracts splendid comedy from it. The new material is expressed in a new fictional form; he has long regarded each novel he embarks on as presenting a fresh set of formal problems to be encountered and solved. Therapy is Lodge's first novel since Ginger, You're Barmy to be told entirely in the first person, though with a significant difference. The earlier novel was supposed to be a written narrative (as were the extracts from Bernard Walsh's journal in Paradise News) but Tubby's narrative is a spoken utterance, colloquial, slangy, sometimes obscene, registering every shift of mood from exasperation to exaltation. This kind of oral monologue was called skaz by the Russian Formalist critics, and it has been a conspicuous element of American novels since Mark Twain; one thinks of J. D. Salinger, of Bellow (though Herzog is told in the third person), of Norman Mailer, of Joseph Heller.