Shrinking was just renewed for a second season, and that is very good news. For one, it’s one of the few shows that deals with grief and therapy in a realistic, meaning messy, way. This is not a small thing. I love TV and surprisingly I love therapy, but really hate therapy as portrayed in TV or movies. TV Therapy is often performed by a very put-together, nearly flawless therapist onto a troubled-but-likable patient who just needs to come to grips with their demons by disclosing them. I don’t want to specifically call out any one show, especially not an Apple TV+ and personal favorite, but Ted Lasso, I’m looking in your general direction.
That model unsurprisingly makes for very anti-climatic TV. At most, we’re going to get the juicy details of how the character came to need therapy, and then the therapy is no longer needed. But that also makes for bad therapy. Because actual therapy? That usually consists of both the therapist and patient helping to identify issues in the patient’s thought process, creating strategies to deal with disordered thinking, practicing those strategies until perfected, and dealing with the inevitable backslide. It’s a complicated process routinely performed by equally complicated people.
What I’m trying to say is that your therapists, wonderful as they are, need their own therapists. Therapists are humans with human relationships who make mistakes and do things poorly. Having insights into why people are screwed up doesn’t prevent someone from being screwed up. At best what it means is that when they’re having a really hard time with the death of a loved one, divorce, familial estrangement, etc., they can say, “OK, I get why I slept with my boss. Let’s talk about what steps I can take to not do that again.” The fact that Shrinking portrays therapy and the messy therapists who do it as actual human beings engaged in growth makes it one of the best shows on therapy made . . . possibly ever.
And two, Harrison Ford is there. Now I’m not going to talk exclusively about Harrison Ford (because Jessica Williams is there too), but I’m going to talk about him.
As you might remember from the other time I passive-aggressively shouted at you to watch the show, Shrinking stars Jason Segel as Jimmy, a therapist who was recently and unexpectedly widowed when his wife was killed in a car accident. (Quick tangent, but how did we decide ‘widow’ means ‘woman who lost her spouse’ and ‘widower’ means ‘man who lost his spouse’? If English were your second language that would be enough to give up right there, yes? A widow should be a person who has been widowed, and a widower should be the person who did the widowing i.e. dead. Like it is in every other case where ‘er’ means ‘to do something.’ Baker, painter, writer, widower. One of those just means ‘dude’? Come on.)
Jimmy is a mess. Not a mess as in he’s performing less well than you’d expect him to because of his recent trauma. I mean a mess as in doing blow with hookers at 3am in the backyard of his Pasadena home. It isn’t that he’s not doing as well as he should be considering he’s a mental health professional and father. He isn’t doing as well as he should be were he a college sophomore with an overbearing mother going through his first serious break-up. It’s bad. But despite it being bad, it never gets Movie Level bad. That level of bad where you’re genuinely concerned that the person having a Bad Time might do some serious damage to themselves. Instead, it’s just a lot of Jimmy’s loved ones expressing concern and exasperation that he’s still having trouble getting his shit together.
Those expressions of concern and exasperation are also usually done with a fair amount of playful-but-still-biting meanness thanks to showrunner Bill Lawrence. He’s the guy that did Scrubs and Cougar Town and had a big hand in Ted Lasso? Yeah, here’s one other thing: he cast his real-life spouse Christa Miller to play Jimmy’s neighbor Liz. Liz is married to Derek. Liz loves Derek, but as she explains, “he’s retiring soon, and [she] can only love him for like an hour and forty-five minutes a day.” I don’t know what kind of magical marriage Lawrence and Miller have that he routinely casts her as a woman who desperately loves her husband yet would ideally live in her own house if possible, but it makes me very jealous. I want that wife. Their relationship isn’t “perfect” because they want to be together every single moment, it’s perfect because two adults have decided they’d rather have each other’s bullshit than not have each other.
Also, holy shit, I haven’t even gotten to Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams yet. Ford plays Jimmy’s mentor and practice partner, Paul, who was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. But that’s not the thing that makes him fucked up. Despite being a tremendously talented therapist, Paul is completely unable to connect with his own family and often retreats to his self-professed Fortress of Solitude. Which, like, my dude, I also live alone. I get you, it’s great, but putting “Solitude” right there in the house name is a lot.
Jessica Williams, who is taking a major lead as possibly my favorite person doing stuff right now, could do nearly anything she wants, but what she’s doing here is playing the third parent at the therapy practice–and Jimmy’s dead wife’s best friend. She’s not messy or fucked up like the fucked up people she’s supposed to be fixing other fucked up people with, but she struggles with her romantic relationships, her practice, her career. She makes mistakes and can figure out how to own them. She’s amazing and looks fantastic while doing it, but still, she has her bad days.
All of this could be a pretty big bummer in the wrong hands. Having a few people make a mess of their lives while being borderline-to-full-on bitchy to each other is what I imagine a lot of the Housewives franchises are like, but I can’t say for sure because that kind of mean bums me out. You know what doesn’t bum me out?
That’s right, Roy Goddamn Kent. In addition to Bill Lawrence, Shrinking stole some Ted Lasso magic in the form of writer/actor/now co-creator Brett Goldstein, and Goldstein is magnificent at this. (Also magnificent on the show are Luke Tennie, Lukita Maxwell, Michael Urie, and Ted McGinley. I’m so sorry, I will talk about you the next time I write, I’m just running out of space.) Writing about a character who’s experienced a tremendous loss is a great way to get Oscar buzz and a terrible way to write a comedy. Because grief is never portrayed as having any lightness. Someone dies and your entire world goes dark. Only it really doesn’t. It goes dark for a bit, and then you’re expected to continue walking around living a life that no longer seems like yours. It’s absurd.
And absurdity is funny. Sure, dealing with death isn’t fun, but the idea of carving out only sadness while dealing with death is impossible. You can’t be sad all day every day until you get over your grief (like, maybe 15 minutes tops). You have to keep getting up and taking care of your family and going to work where you’re expected to help other people while your entire life has been demolished, and yes, Goldstein knows that there’s humor in that while not taking away from the messiness of it. The show isn’t about people who are somehow better at dealing with grief because they’re able to avoid being fucked up but because they can look around at all the ways they’re doing it wrong and say, “Man, this is fucked up.” It’s a show about trying to get better while being gentle with yourself when you’re not. Which is, mostly, the best kind of therapy you can find.
Shrinking streams Thursday nights on Apple TV+.
