The Apple TV comedy Shrinking boasts a lot of big names in its cast, including Harrison Ford, Jason Segel, and Jessica Williams, all of whom play therapists. The series shares some of its creators with Ted Lasso. It has a big heart and a lot of jokes, even if you absolutely, definitely would not want your therapist to take any cues from it. NPR regarding Shrinking
Shrinking on Apple TV as described on IMDB: “A grieving therapist starts to tell his clients exactly what he thinks. Ignoring his training and ethics, he finds himself making huge changes to people’s lives — including his own.”
Note: This post is being updated in 2024 after seeing the whole first season.
Kristen Baldwin, ew.com, calls this series “a funny, brainy grief-com about the power — and dangers — of radical honesty.” (See “Radical Honesty“).
In a nutshell, Jason Segel plays therapist and single parent Jimmy, whose wife died a year ago. He’s now a mess.
During the day, a fried and hungover Jimmy heads to work at the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Center, where he struggles to stay engaged as his regular patients recite their regular complaints. Exhausted and pushed to the limits of decorum by a woman (SNL‘s Heidi Gardner) who’s forever making excuses for her emotionally abusive husband, Jimmy erupts. ‘Just f—ing leave him!’ To his surprise, it works. Despite warnings from his methodical boss Paul (Harrison Ford) and newly divorced colleague Gabby (Jessica Williams), Jimmy decides to continue his ‘psychological vigilante’ approach with his newest patient, Sean (Luke Tennie), a military vet who keeps getting into violent altercations with strangers.
Linda Holmes, NPR, believes that larger than the issue of radical honesty is “that on top of his own struggles, he has to listen to everybody else’s — one of the themes of the show is that even your therapist has stuff.” (As if this writer of the novel Minding Therapy didn’t already know that!)
It’s Paul’s opinion, in fact, that Jimmy has compassion fatigue; this, however, doesn’t excuse his behavior. (See this previous post about a therapist in therapy and this one on impaired therapists.) While Paul does not condone his behavior, his confrontations also don’t make much of a difference in the way Jimmy is functioning. There needs to be more. Why isn’t he receiving outside supervision or getting therapy himself?
Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times: “If [Jimmy] were a responsible [therapist] he’d have taken a sabbatical and sent his clients elsewhere, because if this is how he’s doing after a year, one wonders how he was getting on at three or six or nine months…”
So true.
Nick Schager, The Daily Beast, sees Jimmy as “a jerk, an idiot, and a lousy doctor all at once, and the show’s attempt to make that cute and okay—because, you see, it’s a byproduct of the inner pain he can’t face—is its prime, if far from only, failing.”
Okay, but somehow, actually, I think it all works. Back to Linda Holmes (NPR), who remarks that in addition to its great ensemble cast (which also includes Michael Urie, Christa Miller, and Ted McGinley, to name a few), the series “is a bright spot in a very crowded landscape that isn’t always this good at taking pain and decency — and comedy — and giving them all room to breathe.”
When it comes right down to it, all the main adults in this cast of characters are exaggeratedly flawed, and many show that they do understand therapist and personal boundaries on some level—Paul, for example, exercises particularly rigid ones—even if not following them. This and their attempts to change, grow, and bond with others are appealing aspects of Shrinking that help make a second season a must-see.
