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.
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.
However, in most ways, Shrinking Season 2 is the same show as it was the first time around. A lot of the therapy still isn’t “good.” Jimmy’s mentor Paul (Harrison Ford) takes Sean (Luke Tennie) off the former’s caseload because of the plethora of ways their relationship has completely violated the bounds of doctor-client. Sean lives in Jimmy’s pool house, for God’s sake. And yet, two episodes later, the trio enjoy a ball game and beers together in that same pool house. So the show gets it, but it doesn’t really “get it,” you know?
And yet, I feel so much less complicated in my endorsement of this season. Since the show has evolved and grown but not changed, precisely, I’m forced to conclude I have. I’m more willing to meet the series now in its three steps left unreality. Shrinking, in many ways, dwells in the same land that Scrubs did. That series was all fantasies and over-the-top behaviors. Yet, it was also often cited as one of the most accurate depictions of being a doctor. Shrinking Season 2 cements that same sort of “true, but you need to squint” vibe.
Freed from worrying about accuracy, it becomes easier to see what the show does so well. Like most Lawrence projects, it is a joke factory that doubles as the best endorsement of humanism on-screen. The inclusion of co-creator Brett Goldstein in the cast makes it clear how that philosophy only becomes more important, more necessary, the harder it is to apply to, well, humans. It would be wrong to spoil Goldstein’s role here, but he’s in an entirely different mode than his role as Roy on Ted Lasso. I might prefer his performance here. In the seven episodes available to review when I screened the series, he was deeply internal yet capable of ringing laughs out of some impossibly tragic material.
Joining Goldstein as a new cast member this season is Damon Wayans Jr. as Derek, a former co-worker of Jimmy’s neighbor, the first Derek (Ted McGinley, who is upgraded to the main cast this season). Wayans is always a welcome presence, and he slides into the ensemble quite nicely. Unfortunately, seven episodes in, he remains a bit more sketch than three-dimensional figure, but with a cast this stacked, that’s ok.
What helps is that nearly all the returning players get deeper this time out. Besides McGinley finally getting to showcase a mood besides unfettered cheerfulness as the first Derek, his wife Liz (Christa Miller) gains some complexity that largely evaded her last season. Gaby’s (Jessica Williams) family gets explored some and she has one of the best moments of the early going, calling Jimmy on his all too casual self-centeredness. Hell, even Jimmy’s daughter Alice’s (Lukita Maxwell) party girl best friend Summer (Rachel Stubington) gets some depth. And possibly creates the bop of the fall? The only character that doesn’t get much more depth is Sean. Thankfully, that’s largely because Tennie nailed him so well out of the gate.
While a show like this isn’t too much about its visual language, it is nonetheless worth noting that Shrinking Season 2 boasts more complexity in this department. The way it repeatedly frames the quite tall Segel from a distance and from above to convey a certain smallness, for instance, feels sharper and better deployed this season. There is more variety in the two and three-shots, which are the show’s bread and butter. Additionally, there’s more willingness to let the camera settle in and watch. That’s a choice that allows the actors to employ more subtlety in both the comedic and dramatic scenes.
Shrinking Season 2 finds the show changed some and this reviewer changed plenty, bringing us closer together. I recommended Season 1 with some huge caveats. It feels good to recommend Season 2 far less apologetically.
Shrinking Season 2 looks over the Rorschach cards starting October 16 on AppleTV+.