2 Best TV Shows Similar to Bad Education

Shrinking Season 2 picks up a bit down the road from where Season 1 ended in time, but it immediately reconnects with its final moments. That is when Jimmy’s (Jason Segel) client Grace (Heidi Gardner) took his guidance a bit too much to heart and violently interrupted the negative patterns in her communication with her husband. Speaking of picking up right where things left off, when I last reviewed the show? I was almost certainly a bit too harsh. Overall I recommended the series. Still, I spent much of the review vocalizing about the ways it didn’t get mental health concerns or therapy right. It can be hard to review something that revolves around your job. That’s why so many podcasters reviewing Nobody Wants This spend a considerable portion of their reviews talking about how unrealistic the show’s depiction of podcasting is. (That show’s depiction of Judaism is another matter, one I should’ve been a little more on top of, perhaps. But that’s a discussion for another day.) As I had just stopped being a therapist—perhaps for good—to write full-time, I think I was especially activated by the show’s rather…flippant depiction of the field. Jessica Williams and Christa Miller spend time in the most chaotic, best appointed therapist office ever. (AppleTV+) In Shrinking Season 2, several consequences of Jimmy’s “psychological vigilantism” come home to roost, not just with Grace. That helps refine my perspective. Additionally, with distance, the depiction of Jimmy’s rock bottom, briefly glimpsed at the beginning of Season 1, feels more honest. For once, it seems as though “tell, not show” was the better avenue to capturing his downward spiral of addiction, self-hatred, parental abdication, and general interpersonal awfulness. Continue Reading →

After six about 20-minute episodes of the Shane Gillis-Steve Gerben-created sitcom Tires, one can begin to understand why Netflix would want to work with him. He has a certain charisma and some acting chops. In one scene during the first episode, Gillis’ character, also named Shane, tries to snow a very unhappy reporter. In the sequence, Gillis has to convey to the audience that he doesn’t mean a word he’s saying and is using the moment to humiliate his boss and cousin Will (Gerben) while playing authentic convincingly enough that one can see why the reporter might fall for it. It’s not an easy lift, but Gillis makes it work. The story is fine enough for a hangout comedy. Will is a failure whose father owns several tire stores. Either as punishment or because it’s where he can do the least harm, Dad has exiled Will to manage one of the two lowest-performing branches of the chain. Physically slight and coded as a kind of nerd, Will doesn’t fit in with the mechanics, including their seeming ringleader, Shane. To save the shop and his job and earn his dad’s affection, he spends every episode of a “marketing” idea that derails spectacularly.  Catch a glimpse of Steve Gerben. (Netflix) The bad news is that, despite a sound enough premise, everything the show says or tries has the shape of jokes without actually including a laugh line. It’s the essence of humor without any of the pesky chuckles. Continue Reading →