The first season of “Shrinking” felt a bit like a show trying to find its voice. Created by Bill Lawrence, Brett Goldstein, and Jason Segel, it was clearly a personal project for Segel, who threw himself into the role of a therapist suffering from the deep wounds of grief after the loss of his wife sent him spiraling into self-destructive behavior. The concept of a shrink who crosses arguable ethical lines as he pushes his patients to self-discovery could come off a little manufactured, almost like a network sitcom idea more than a streaming one, but the writers drifted away from that structure in season two and have almost entirely abandoned it in three.
More than a show about modern therapy, “Shrinking” has become about the complex emotional issues around people who know one another better than they know themselves. It’s about a close-knit group of people who would quite literally die for one another but still hold back parts of their emotional and mental beings despite that support and affection. It’s about what we reveal and what we hide from our friends, partners, and ourselves. And in a time when it feels like we could all use a shoulder to lean on, it feels increasingly like a balm for troubled times, a reminder that nothing is more important in this world than the people we love.
When season 3 starts, Jimmy (Segel) is preparing to say goodbye to the person most important to him, his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell). Of course, Alice helped pull Jimmy out of his self-destructive spiral when Tia died, which means he’s not just experiencing the traditional unmooring that comes when a kid leaves home. The season pivots on the kind of chapter breaks that we get in life whether it’s a graduation, a divorce, a new baby, or even a Parkinson’s diagnosis.
The last one is what faces Paul (Harrison Ford), who hears in the premiere, from none other than Michael J. Fox in a guest role, about what he should plan for, including decreased mobility and even hallucinations. As he plans to leave town and his practice to either Jimmy or Gaby (Jessica Williams), Paul faces the natural processes of considered choices and messy goodbyes. Paul’s arc this season is one of several in which the writing and character work overcomes so many potential traps. Yes, sometimes conflict can feel manufactured on “Shrinking,” but the work by the cast, especially Segel and Ford, is so nuanced and grounded that we roll with the clichés. Clichés become so because they tap into certain universal truths about how things like graduation and mortality can look similar across all demographics. “Shrinking” is about how the unexpected can spin us off into better versions of ourselves, especially if we turn to those who have always been there for us in our times of need.
Of course, “Shrinking” is also still about grief, and how it can resurface and rock us in ways that we can’t predict or solve through a simple therapy session. Williams gets an arc this season related to grief that can feel a bit manipulative, but it also fits squarely in one of the themes of the show: We can only help people so much before they have to help themselves, and it’s not our fault if they don’t. And that we can’t always be strong for others if it makes us emotionally weak. The final arc of the season centers complex feelings that Jimmy has for his often-distant father (Jeff Daniels) and how those repressed emotions are impacted by the imminent departures of Alice and Paul. We all have times in our lives in which it feels like we’re being abandoned. The writers on “Shrinking” are so good at turning these universal truths into TV comedy.
None of this works without a consistently entertaining ensemble who have truly figured out the voices and inner lives of these characters. It can still feel like Williams is getting the short straw when it comes to the main trio, but one can truly feel the team behind the show trying to shift that perspective this season, giving Gaby multiple arcs and even a consistent relationship (with the more regular Damon Wayans Jr.) As good as Segel and Ford are, “Shrinking” keeps improving because it takes the time with all of its team, giving season-long narratives to Sean (Luke Tennie), Brian (Michael Urie), Liz (Christa Miller), and even Derek (Ted McGinley) this year too. A lot of fiction has centered faulty men and the support structures they often take for granted, but few have taken the time to really do the work on a character level to make sure all the pieces fit.
Lawrence has said that the theme of the third season is “moving forward.” We can’t stop things like our kids leaving home or even our bodies breaking down, but “Shrinking” feels like an honest, humanist look at how we move through these events. Sometimes they unearth emotionally repressed memories. Sometimes they remind us of what’s really important: It’s the people who have been around us when those hurdles have been in our path. The ones who always will be, and the ones who no longer are.
Whole season screened for review. Premieres on Apple TV on January 28.
