I’ve finally made my way to the season finale of Shrinking, the excellent show Bill Lawrence was making instead of showrunning Ted Lasso for its final, not-so-great season. (Apple TV+ could’ve waited another year to make Shrinking, is what I’m saying.)
Here’s the thing: like my other favorite Lawrence show, Cougar Town, the greatness of Shrinking snuck up on me. Both shows start out with characters who feel a little unpleasant, a bit prickly…and then they come together and their individual weirdnesses slowly go from clashing to melding, until finally they exist in a bizarre, hilarious little subculture all their own. But the Shrinking subculture includes therapy, and also parenting, and specifically therapists who are parents.
And that’s my problem. We all know that therapists are often the most messed-up people. That’s such a common thing that it’s basically a TV trope. But the idea of therapists as messed-up parents is, for lack of a better word, icky. As a parent myself, I found it extremely uncomfortable to watch a lot of this season’s events and even now, having seen what I think was supposed to be a happy ending, I’m left wondering whether or not I’m actually meant to be, you know, happy with it.
There are three main parents in the show. One is Paul, played by Harrison Motherfucking Ford. He’s old, he’s cranky, he’s brilliant, and he keeps his adult daughter at arm’s length because he basically abandoned her and her mom when she was little. Not in the “deadbeat dad” way, just in the “distant, workaholic, let mom do all the childrearing, divorced dad” way. He knows he doesn’t deserve her love, and he acts accordingly. Well and good. Then there’s Liz, a suburban empty nester who doesn’t know what to do with herself now so she spends her energy mothering Alice, the teenage daughter of her recently deceased neighbor.
And then there’s Jimmy, Alice’s actual father. Who is still alive. Remember how I said Liz is taking care of Alice? Right, well, she’s the ONLY ONE doing that. When we meet him, Jimmy is busy doing drugs and hanging out with hookers*. In his house, where his daughter lives. I think we’re supposed to be sympathetic, because he’s a grieving widower, but again, he is doing drugs with hookers while his child is in her room upstairs. (Later in the season, Alice talks about “cleaning [your] cocaine off a picture of Meema.”) I have no sympathy, though, because he still manages to get to work every day without bothering to get his kid to school, and I guess since he’s a wealthy man in Pasadena nobody calls CPS on his ass.
I’m all for antiheroes, but honestly this is a tough way to introduce a character in a comedy and expect viewers to go along with his rehabilitation. Jamie Tartt was a right arsehole when we met him and now he’s my favorite character from Ted Lasso! But a father who starts out this way…well, that’s a tough one to rehab. Because Jimmy’s not just wallowing in his own grief while neglecting his daughter’s needs, he’s also kind of a dick to her. At one point instead of apologizing, he basically explains why he can’t even stand to be around her by telling her it’s because “you look so much like your mom.” That’s psychologically cruel when denying your child the comfort of her only living parent, it’s an awful thing to say to your child WHOSE MOM HAS JUST DIED, and Jimmy knows that more than most people would because he is a goddamn psychologist. That part makes it all so much more unforgiveable, and the show doesn’t really acknowledge it. He’s an adult, and she’s not. As a parent, he’s supposed to put her needs first. But if he can’t do that because of his grief, the absolute least he could do is not put his own grief on her. And he is a trained therapist who is aware of all these things. (And no, making that line a “sweet” callback in the season finale doesn’t erase any of these issues, it simply ignores the fact that Alice wouldn’t find it sweet at all. I can’t help but wonder whether the writers really thought about any of this from her perspective.)
The people around Jimmy–his colleagues Paul and Gaby–are generally supportive of him as he grieves without calling out his absolute shit parenting and the damage he’s doing to Alice. That’s nice, I suppose, in that they’re psychologists who understand that everybody grieves in their own way. Additionally, Paul supports Alice separately, hanging out with her to offer a type of therapy, although the benefits of that relationship go both ways, giving him insight into how he might repair his own broken family. Gaby, the best friend of Alice’s dead mother, is shockingly absent from Alice’s life and seems more annoyed by Liz being “a mom” than by Jimmy being a fucking nightmare. Let’s chalk that up to Gaby’s own marriage falling apart, because later in the season she does reconnect with Alice and they seem to have a big sister/little sister vibe.
But only Liz offers the type of parenting a 17-year-old actually needs. Someone who goes to the school meetings and pays attention to her schedule. Someone who realizes she’s dropped out of clubs in the wake of her mother’s death. Someone who’s keeping track of the overwhelming college application stuff. Someone who knows her sports schedule, is aware of when practice is, and shows up at games. Someone who FEEDS HER. For doing all this–which is not as easy to do as it is to type out here, and I speak feelingly–Liz is treated with eye rolls and sarcasm by pretty much everyone else on the show. I am personally offended by this. Being a mom is a thankless job when the kid is your own. To do this job for someone else’s kid, without being asked, simply because the kid needs it–and while the kid’s actual parent is LOUDLY DOING DRUGS WITH HOOKERS NEXT DOOR WHILE YOU’RE ALL TRYING TO SLEEP–deserves all the flowers. Liz is a hero, period. Not annoying, not overbearing, not “she needs a hobby” or “she needs to dial it back.” She is a goddamn hero, and if Alice grew up to speak to none of these people ever again except for Liz, it would be justified.
Over the course of the season, Jimmy struggles to correct his behavior and repair his relationship with Alice. Sort of. I guess. It’s more about him, though. His grief. His guilt about sleeping with Gaby, his wife’s best friend, rather than how fucked up that is for Alice to have to deal with (Gaby gets some side-eye for that one, too). His decision to move one of his patients into their house without clearing it with his teenage daughter–that’s not okay. His getting all patriarchal and mad about Alice not being a virgin and developing a crush on his patient–sorry, dude, you don’t get to have sex workers in the house, talk to your kid about sex positions with her mom’s best friend, and then be squicked out by her not being pure.
At one point, Jimmy realizes he needs to move forward, so he says a tearful goodbye to the photos of his life with his wife…and moves all her stuff into storage. Again, photo albums of their family, which includes Alice. He needs to move on, so he packs all that stuff away. Because HE needs to move on. He doesn’t tell Alice. He lets her come home and find all her mother’s stuff gone, and be traumatized by that. And then after she’s traumatized, he says he’ll just sort of wait for her to work through it on her own. What. An. Asshole. Thankfully, he comes to his senses and gets the stuff back and puts it in Alice’s room, having finally realized, a year too late, that she has also lost somebody. I need to say again here, she’s a child and he’s a grown man. She’s lost her mother while he’s lost his wife. Both are terrible, but he was, presumably, a functioning adult before this. Alice wasn’t. He should still be able to do the most basic adulting. That includes realizing that your kid losing her mother is catastrophic and she, unlike you, doesn’t have any ability to recognize or deal with grief.
The season ends on what I think is supposed to be Jimmy’s realization that it’s not all about him. Except it’s a moment of him talking about himself and his wife…while he’s officiating somebody else’s wedding. So he’s making it all about him. His friends and family–even Alice–smile and applaud. I have to say, it worries me. I don’t think he’s really learned much. I think they’ve all just enabled him to the point that he’s able to present as healthier than he did before, and that’s because poor Alice and her surrogate mother, Liz, have now been roped in as enablers too.
I really like this show. It’s hilarious. The cast is stellar, the writing is sharp, and the final scene–featuring one of Jimmy’s patients–makes me really interested to see where they’re going in season two. But if I’m supposed to feel that Jimmy himself is a good father, or even a little bit of the way toward becoming one, then I think I’m gonna need some of whatever drugs he’s on.
*Just to be clear, I have nothing against hookers or the work they do. Sex work is work, and to its credit, the show and the characters on it treat these sex workers with absolute respect. My issue is with bringing women you are paying to bang into your grief-stricken daughter’s house where you lived with–and banged–her beloved mother. While she is home and aware that you’re doing this, night after night. In other words, the hookers are A-OK. It’s Jimmy who is the problem. He should’ve gone to a hotel, he can afford it.
