‘Shrinking’ Series Review: ‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Loot’ Had a Baby
Apple TV Plus is doubling down on its 30-minute comedies. After last year’s Loot (which has a second season on the way) and before Ted Lasso comes back this spring, the streamer has just released Shrinking.
The series, created by Jason Segel, Bill Lawrence, and Brett Goldstein, follows Jimmy (played by Segel), a therapist grieving from the loss of his wife who starts to throw the playbook out the window and gets real with his patients, telling them exactly what he thinks. At times, that results in Jimmy yelling at his patients without any self-awareness, and at times it results in one of them moving in with him. He shares a practice with two other doctors, Gabby, played by Jessica Williams, and Paul, played by Harrison Ford in a role that was undoubtedly written for him.
Much like Ted Lasso, also a Lawrence-Goldstein creation, the series has a built-in emotional hook for its main characters, who use humor to disguise their inner demons. Jimmy is trying to raise a teenage daughter (Lukita Maxwell), who found a connection with their neighbor Liz, played by Christa Miller. Father and daughter have been dealing with the loss in different and separate ways, and they must learn to come together and cry with one another. To help them deal with their individual pain they start to gather help from Gabby, the cool aunt with whom Alice can open up freely, and Paul, the grumpy, “get off my loan” grandpa who has a softer side that only Alice knows how to exploit.
Jason Segel and Jessica Williams in “Shrinking,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Shrinking is definitely an uneven comedy that takes the heart of Ted Lasso and buries it underneath the ridiculousness of Loot‘s humor. It is the emotional core of the series, that is, all of the character arcs that are built through their interactions and relationships, that make us keep watching, but it is also cringe-worthy levels of humor that at times prevent us from clicking play on the next episode right away. In 10 episodes (of which we’ve seen 9), the series manages to build strong character arcs and the writers make us care for these people (some more than others), but Ford is the only actor in the show that made me chuckle, and that’s mostly because he’s playing a caricature of himself.
Casting Segel in the lead role was probably the wrong way to go — we know from How I Met Your Mother that he can be extremely funny, but can also make us empathize with his characters under the most tragic of circumstances. However, he played Jimmy in a very overt and exaggerated way, and the series might have benefitted from someone more restrained on average, just so that when he starts yelling, we don’t see it coming, and when he gets serious with his daughter, we also believe it.
On the flip side, Jessica Williams is, next to Ford, the most engaging actress in the entire series. She keeps Gabby always on the edge, almost acting as the audience’s point of view at times. She is the most relatable character because we see her struggle when dealing with an increasingly deranged Jimmy, and a grumpier-by-the-day Paul. She also checks on Alice, who is the pumping heart of the series and has less screen time than she deserves. Gabby’s arc is revealed in later episodes, though I must say that it could have been a bit more fleshed out. The actress does a great job with the material she’s given.
Harrison Ford and Lukita Maxwell in “Shrinking,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Shrinking also has some writing inconsistencies across its first (and I’m suspecting not last) season. Segel’s character, for instance, appears in the cold open of the first episode as a completely different character than the one he is later. It’s as if that scene, which has him in the pool, high and with two prostitutes while his teenage daughter is asleep, had been kept from a much earlier version of the scripts. That “phase” of his grieving process is only referenced once in the first nine episodes of the season and shows a character who looks nothing like the one we see in the rest of the show.
The best description possible I can come up with for Shrinking is that it is a middle ground between Loot and Ted Lasso. If you enjoyed both series, you will probably enjoy this too. If you’re like me, and you did not enjoy Maya Rudolph’s comedy last year, but absolutely love Jason Sudeikis’ series, you will probably have a similar reaction to it than me. It is a comedy that doesn’t pull off a lot of laughs, but kept me semi-hooked for nine episodes. The 30-minute runtimes also helped a great deal with that.
The first two episodes of Shrinking are currently available to stream on Apple TV Plus. New episodes will be released each Friday.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
