In nearly 30 years of creating or co-creating series from Spin City to Scrubs to Bad Monkey, Bill Lawrence has been one of TV’s most reliable sitcom showrunners. He has a great eye for talent in front of and behind the camera. He has a sharp sense of humor and an innate feeling for how to create a warm atmosphere that viewers will want to spend time in week after week, season after season. And he really, really knows how to course-correct.
Some Lawrence shows, like Scrubs and Ted Lasso, arrive fully-formed. Others, though, began life with a high-concept premise that either wasn’t sustainable, or was simply a bad idea. Spin City was originally a romantic comedy where Michael J. Fox’s deputy mayor was secretly dating a City Hall reporter played by Carla Gugino; Gugino was gone within a dozen episodes, and the show pivoted into a hangout comedy about the Fox and his appealing friends from the office. Cougar Town began life as a show about Courteney Cox dating much younger guys; audiences didn’t like this, so within a half-dozen episodes, the show pivoted into a hangout comedy about Cox and her appealing friends from the cul-de-sac. It’s Lawrence’s go-to move when things aren’t going well, and more often than not, it works(*).
(*) The trick is not infallible: Lawrence’s mid-2000s comedy Undateable began as the story of a player teaching a nerd how to talk to women, and (again) very quickly pivoted into a hangout comedy about their appealing friends from a bar. The show improved, but it was still canceled after three seasons, and didn’t attract much attention even when it eventually began performing every episode live.
So, among the least shocking TV developments of last year was the way that Shrinking — the Apple TV comedy that Lawrence created with star Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein from Ted Lasso — began with an off-putting premiere episode and an unwieldy premise, before (say it with me) it quickly pivoted into a hangout comedy about Segel and his appealing friends at home and the office. What followed was an endearing, sweet, and often very funny debut season, which leaned heavily on the Lawrence ethos that, when in doubt, just let funny people be funny together. What was surprising, however, is that the season ended in a way that suggested Lawrence, Segel, and Goldstein weren’t wild about the pivot, and wanted to revert to their original idea.
For those who didn’t watch (or who have simply forgotten in the 18 months since we last got a new episode), Segel plays Jimmy Laird, a therapist whose life has fallen apart in the aftermath of his wife being killed by a drunk driver. When we meet him, Jimmy is spending his nights doing drugs with sex workers, is going through the motions at the practice he shares with his mentor Paul (Harrison Ford) and his friend Gaby (Jessica Williams), and has all but abandoned his grief-stricken daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) to the care of next-door neighbor Liz (Christa Miller, Lawrence’s wife and an alum of both Scrubs and Cougar Town). He pulls out of the spiral through treating Sean (Luke Tennie), an Afghanistan veteran with PTSD-induced anger issues, deciding to abandon his usual detached approach in favor of a more hands-on, almost vigilante style of therapy in which he spends time with Sean and other patients outside the office, and even invites Sean to move into his pool house(*). In the process, Jimmy begins to feel better about himself, and he genuinely helps Sean — but he also runs afoul of the law, gets beaten up in front of Alice and her classmates, and inspires countless lectures from celebrated therapist and author Paul about why the traditional divide between the therapist and patient is there for a reason.
(*) Sean aside, this is very much a show about rich people who can easily throw money at nearly every non-medical or emotional problem — and even some of those, too.
Shrinking Season One never entirely abandoned its core idea in the way that Spin City made Carla Gugino disappear or Cougar Town stopped telling stories about Cox being a cougar. But within a few episodes, it dialed those aspects way back, and largely emphasized placing characters in scenes where they could banter, set up and deliver various running gags, and otherwise be fun for both the audience and one another to spend time with. If former enemies Gaby and Liz were suddenly best friends, then so be it, because Williams and Miller were that good together. If Jimmy’s estranged best friend Brian (Michael Urie) slid right back into the friend group after some minor apologizing from Jimmy, then this was for the best, because of the energy Urie brought to scenes where Brian was paired with characters who otherwise had no real reason to interact with him. Harrison Ford, doing his first predominantly comedic role in decades — albeit with more than a little pathos, since Paul is dealing with the early stages of Parkinson’s — was a delight with pretty much every scene partner.
By the first season finale, almost all seemed right with both Shrinking and the lives of its main characters. Liz and her husband Derek (Ted McGinley, hilariously affable) bought a food truck that Sean and Liz could work in. (Again, being rich is a Shrinking superpower that nobody really talks about.) Jimmy largely repaired his relationships with Alice and with Paul, and he and the recently divorced Gaby began sleeping together in an arrangement that seemed promising for both of them. At Brian’s wedding, Jimmy gave a speech summing up his difficult journey, as well as the series’ key theme about the importance of staying connected to the people in your life — so that you can celebrate the good times together and support each other through the bad — and Paul even congratulated him for putting aside the professionally dangerous behavior from those first few episodes. All was well…
…until, that is, the season ended with Paul’s patient Grace (Heidi Gardner) pushing her emotionally abusive husband off a cliff, taking another piece of unconventional Jimmy advice too literally. Suddenly, it seemed as if Shrinking was about to take Jimmy, and the show, back to places that both had wisely left behind. With Jimmy inadvertently contributing to what was at minimum assault, and possibly much more, wouldn’t the new season get him into more legal trouble, make Paul angrier with him, leave him wracked with guilt and miserable once again? Why, after Lawrence, Segel, and Goldstein had so deftly pulled the Cougar Town maneuver, would they risk going back to that too-dark place?
Fortunately, Season Two proves those fears unfounded. (Or, at least it does through the first 11 of 12 episodes. Maybe Jimmy goes on a bank robbery spree in the finale?) Without spoiling where the Grace story is going, the new episodes acknowledge what happened without overburdening our hero or his friends with her actions, and then move onto other things as quickly as possible. And there’s so much going on throughout the season with everyone else — plus Goldstein himself, strong in a recurring role as a character about whom I can’t say much — that even in the early, more Grace-centric episodes, it never feels like the show has been taken over by this jarring turn.
So, fortunately, Shrinking still feels like itself: a big-hearted comedy that’s unapologetically messy, in terms of story and tone(*), and one that can still turn on a dime from silliness into sorrow. Jimmy is at times a buffoon — because it wouldn’t be a Jason Segel-written project without jokes about his penis, here we get Jimmy trying out an Andre the Giant voice for it — at others clever, and at others still tragic. But it all flows together. Everyone else is given similar range. Ford is having an infectious amount of fun doing and saying the kinds of things he has never gotten to in a movie or show. In one episode, a character makes a TikTok featuring a catchy original rap song called “Cheater Bitch,” and eventually Paul does a spoken-word rendition of the lyrics. But when a scene is about Paul’s fears of running out of time with his loved ones, he’s incredibly poignant. Jessica Williams is somehow even better used than she was in the first season, on both ends of the tonal spectrum. Even McGinley gets some effective serious notes to play as the superhumanly upbeat Derek.
(*) That we get 12-episode seasons, rather than six or eight, also helps enormously. Most modern series would benefit from longer seasons, but relaxed ensemble comedies like this in particular really need the room to stretch. Some characters get multiple subplots over the course of the season, rather than being tied down to one idea for the entire year.
That unlikely friendship between Gaby and Liz has in many ways become the defining component of Shrinking, because it’s given license for the creative team to make every character convincingly want to enjoy the company of, and take care of, every other character. Even Goldstein’s mystery man, who has good reason to be on the outside looking in on this group, makes some moving connections. (He’s one of many recognizable, well-deployed guest stars this time around. Some of them — Segel’s former How I Met Your Mother co-star Cobie Smulders, Cougar Town alum Josh Hopkins — make for fun reunions; others, like Kelly Bishop and Damon Wayans Jr., are welcome newcomers.)
Thankfully, between Seasons One and Two, Lawrence and company didn’t overanalyze what makes Shrinking work.
The first two episodes of Shrinking Season Two begin streaming Oct. 16 on Apple TV+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen 11 of the season’s 12 episodes.
From Rolling Stone US
