The Ted Lasso-ing of Shrinking

Bill Lawrence’s therapy dramedy didn’t start as a harmony-at-all-costs clone of his other TV shows. But it unfortunately became one. Photo: Netflix

The second-season finale of Shrinking, “The Last Thanksgiving,� premiered on Apple TV+ on December 24. Spoilers ahead.

The overarching question of Shrinking’s second season was never if Jimmy (Jason Segel) was going to forgive Louis (Brett Goldstein), the man whose drunk driving killed Jimmy’s wife, Tia (Lilan Bowden). It was when. This harmony-at-all-costs imperative is the Bill Lawrence way, perfected over years of sitcom work on Scrubs and Cougar Town; exploded into major popularity with Ted Lasso; and now resuscitated in Shrinking, co-created by Lawrence, Segel, and Goldstein, which in a second batch of episodes has strayed far from the unpredictable barbs that marked its beginning. In the first season, the series wondered what would happen if therapist Jimmy, despondent after becoming a widower, started giving his patients brusque, confrontational advice on how to deal with their problems. Underneath all of its character-driven wackiness, the question of whether Jimmy was guiding his patients toward revelations or disaster provided imprecise answers. In Shrinking’s sophomore season, however, that sense of uneasy interrogation is gone, and in its place is a puddle of narrative goo, an after-school special masquerading as a sitcom, an act of aggression toward anyone who blanches at the compulsory nature of forgiveness. The second season finale ends with Jimmy and Louis making peace, sitting together in a train station that symbolizes a new path forward for them both. It raises a worrisome prospect for where Shrinking goes from here, as the series has undone practically every element of dramatic interest it once had.

Consider Jimmy’s patient Sean (Luke Tennie) and his PTSD. This man was feuding with his family and letting strangers kick his ass because of whatever vague things happened during his military service in Afghanistan, but barely weeks later, he has convinced a near-stranger to join the U.S. Army because it will help her “see the world� and “get [her] shit together.� And then there’s Jimmy’s best friend, Brian (Michael Urie), and his aversion to having a child, which immediately disappears when he realizes a baby is an accessory and admits to himself that he was just afraid of being a father. (No person on Shrinking is allowed to have legitimate, non-anxiety-based preferences.) What about Jimmy’s neighbors Liz (Christa Miller) and Derek’s (Ted McGinley) marriage woes? Solved! Once Derek absorbed that the only way their partnership works is if he’s happily her punching bag. Jimmy and his senior colleague Paul (Harrison Ford)’s push-pull dynamic at work is even assuaged once Paul decides Jimmy’s boundary-rejecting form of therapy is sort of good. Jimmying, which was a selfish way for Jimmy to work in the first season, suddenly works. These are all gratingly pleasant outcomes that feel both rushed and obvious, and the most frictionless of them all is how Jimmy and Louis resolve their animosity.

Since Louis’s introduction, he and Jimmy have served as mirror images of each other: They’ve both lost the woman they love, they’re both full of self-destructive self-loathing, and they both see in Jimmy’s daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) someone they’ve wronged and toward whom they wish to make amends. Their flashback scenes in “Last Drink,� which seemingly spans the final days before Tia’s death, are conspicuously similar. Jimmy and Tia laugh together in bed to inside jokes, then get serious and swear to each other they’ll take good care of Alice. Louis and his onetime fiancée, Sarah (Meredith Hagner), gently tease each other as she moves in, then get serious when he says, “I really love you, you know.� These men are not so different, even if Shrinking has to pretzel its characters into unrecognizable versions of themselves to insist upon this analogy.

Here’s how the resolution occurs: Brian suddenly becomes empathetic enough to strike up a friendship with Louis, even though they have nothing in common, in an obvious echo of how years ago in college, Brian struck up a friendship with roommate Jimmy, even though they had nothing in common. Meanwhile, Alice, who has agonized over being “the girl with the dead mom,� readily forgives Louis despite him being the cause of her new persona, and then becomes estranged from Jimmy because he won’t forgive Louis. Alice’s support of Jimmying, and her insistence that her father extend that approach to the man who killed his wife (“Why can’t you help him? … It would mean so much more coming from you�), is supposed to persuade us that Jimmy should have been doing this all along, traditional modes of therapy and professional codes of conduct be damned. Who needs identifiable human behavior when you can have an emotionally manipulative cry as Jimmy pulls Louis back from stepping in front of a train and killing himself, and the two face each other in recognition and companionship during the finale’s last scene? Blech, and also, déjà vu.

An awkward-but-likable figure who breaks the rules, connects personally (and probably inappropriately) with the people he’s supposed to be responsible for guiding and teaching, and exists in a milieu where clemency is enforced with oppressive zeal — that’s Ted Lasso, and it’s also Shrinking. Overlaps between the shows were never out of the question because of Lawrence and Goldstein’s history on Ted Lasso (the former co-created and wrote on Lasso, the latter wrote on and starred in it as grumpy assistant coach Roy), but a carbon copy of that show isn’t what Shrinking initially seemed to be. Now, Jimmy is AFC Richmond coach Ted, the guy with the unorthodox ideas that shockingly turn around and better the lives of people used to disappointment and stasis. Paul is Roy, the prickly guy whose sarcastic exterior hides a soppy desire to be loved. Liz and her tumbled rocks for her favorite people are a version of Ted and his shortbread cookies for AFC Richmond owner Rebecca. Jimmy’s daughter, Alice, demanding that Jimmy absolve Louis is a reflection of Ted’s son, Henry, reminding his father that he and underappreciated turned villainous former kit man Nate (Nick Mohammed) once used to be friends. And Jimmy and Louis meeting again on tolerant terms, after realizing the heartbreak they share is a unifier rather than a divider, is a simulation of the rapprochement between Ted and Nate at the end of Ted Lasso’s third season — with all of its accompanying treacly artifice.

Where does Shrinking go now, after it’s taken a Fast & Furious approach to expanding its ensemble with redeemed characters who were previously presented as villains? (Obviously, Goldstein is Shrinking’s inferior version of Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw.) Interestingly, there’s been no discussion of what Louis’s surprisingly brief time in prison was like for him — aside from the implication that he got out early for good behavior, because he’s a good man who made just one mistake — or why after his release he moved back to the same town where a woman died because of his actions — aside from his need to apologize to Jimmy and Alice, because again, he’s a good man who made just one mistake. He’s a contrivance, not a fully-fledged character, and Shrinking will need to do more in its already-ordered third season to make him feel more real. (It’s probably safe to assume that Goldstein, as a co-creator of the show, is staying put in its cast.) Perhaps Hagner, who worked with Lawrence on his other Apple TV+ series, Bad Monkey, will return to be part of Louis’s life after he forced their breakup before his sentence. Maybe Louis and Sean will be roommates or work together in Sean’s food truck. We certainly can’t discredit the possibility that Louis will become a patient of Jimmy’s, Paul’s, or Gaby’s (Jessica Williams), or maybe even take Gaby’s psychology class if he decides to go back to school and pursue another career. Does Louis get gifted one of Liz’s rocks to show that he’s really in La Familia? There’s seemingly no limit to how Shrinking continues to make its world smaller, its characters more incestuous in their dynamics (think of Sean dating Paul’s neurologist and Liz vetting Brian’s nanny candidates), and its vision of self-betterment simplistic to the point of offense. The only thing that’s missing from Shrinking is the “Believe� sign, and at this point, I’d welcome another Ted Lasso reprise: It getting torn up.