Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Shrinking Season 2.
Shrinking: Season 2
I’d find it very hard to turn down having Harrison Ford as a therapist. He has the kind easy clarity that could see him face up to a dragon, shrug, and simply blow out its fire breath. And so I can’t really say no to Apple TV+’s Shrinking, the (newish) Ted Lasso successor co-created by one of its stars, Brett Goldstein, and one of its creators, Bill Lawrence, alongside Jason Segel.
When I say “Ted Lasso successor”, all that really means these days is a pleasant, well-written sitcom, constructed around a sturdy framework. Shrinking sees hard emotions made easily digestible, then laced with some cognitive behavioural therapy buzzwords. Ford’s therapist character, Dr. Paul Rhoades, will say something withering, in a lethal deadpan that could kill lesser men, before introducing the idea of “reversal of desire”, a real technique intended to help people approach difficult conversations and ideas. “You can’t spend your life hiding from your trauma,” he warns.
Shrinking is certainly a series chiefly about trauma, whose main character, Segel’s Jimmy Laird, is still deep in the grief process after the sudden loss of his wife in a car crash. And it’s a lot harder to eulogise coping strategies and mindfulness when your entire existence has become one, stinking marsh of misery and self-hatred – his last conversation with her was an argument, and he turned to drugs and sex instead of being there for his teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell).
Instead, in season one, he turned to something swiftly coined “Jimmying”, a way to throw out the rulebook and develop a professionally questionable closeness with his clients, which (unsurprisingly) produced mixed results. Sean (Luke Tennie) a veteran with PTSD, now lives with him, but has a much better handle on his anger issues; Grace (Heidi Gardner) seemed to successfully free herself from her abusive husband’s orbit, only to take Jimmy’s advice a little too literally and shove him off a cliff.
She’s in jail now. Season two deals with the fallout, as Grace (naturally) blames her therapist for her predicament, while Sean entangles himself further by opening a food truck business with their neighbour, Liz (Christa Miller). It’s funny about the hard stuff, yet never flippant.
Segel’s approach to the role feels very specific, especially in how he accesses Jimmy’s inability to fully communicate his feelings to Alice, as both are forced to confront the root cause of all their pain. His gift has always been in how believably he can tease out the profound sadness that tends to lie behind life’s natural jesters.
Shrinking, at one point, made me think back to the scene in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a broadly comedic movie, in which his character sits at the piano, belting, “Peter you suck… it’s so self-loathing! See a psychiatrist, I hate the psychiatrist!” It’s poignant to see that same insecurity sitting in the other chair of the therapist’s office.
It’s a delicate balance to maintain, to dig through those uncomfortable experiences with a lightness of touch. You could say Shrinking itself feels like good therapy. Recovery and resolution aren’t one-off journeys, and Sean, even if he’s made formidable progress, still has to occasionally deal with that old anger rearing up out of the shadows. Shrinking creates a safe space for life’s messes.
