Shrinking


Harrison Ford and Jason Segel in “Shrinking.” Apple TV+ image via IMDB.com


Less a TV comedy series than a global paradigm shift, “Ted Lasso” was a tough act to follow.

But after allowing a suitable time to miss it, two of the show's producers – Brett Goldstein and Bill Lawrence – joined Jason Segel to come up with an almost-as-good backup replacement. “Shrinking” recently started its second season on Apple TV+. New episodes come out every Wednesday.

The great title isn't so much a metaphor as a job description of what stars Segel, Jessica Williams and – wait for it! – Harrison Ford do five days a week. They're therapists in an LA psychology practice, even if they're almost as loony tunes as their clientele.

There are reasons for their odd behavior.

Jimmy (Segel) lost his wife in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. He spent last season barely able to get up in the morning, much less attend to the needs of his teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), also grieving the loss.

Paul (Ford), the senior member of the practice, has his own challenges. He's got Parkinson's.

Just as Ted Lasso taped up his “Believe” sign despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, so the broken places in “Shrinking's” characters wind up being sources of the show's heart … and humor. 

Tap dancing on the edge of pathos, the brilliance of the writing is its seamless ability to swing from profanity-laden zingers to moments of tenderness, and then back again without missing a beat.

Considering that he's not doing all that well with his own issues, Jimmy further mucks things up by getting all personally involved in solving his patients' problems. Things won't end well, you sense.

Not only does this violate all his training, but it also pisses off his boss, Paul. It doesn't take much to piss off Paul.

Turns out Harrison Ford is as good at cranky comedy as he was at daredevil heroism a long time ago in galaxies far far away. Part of the show's fun is taking shots at his super-ness, many from Ford himself.

Leads Jason Segel and Jessica Williams more than earned their Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for season 1 with perfectly modulated hilarity and vulnerability. But like “Ted Lasso,” the show is very much a team effort. Lukita Maxwell, Michael Urie, Luke Tennie, Ted McGinley and especially Christa Miller all get their moments to shine in the ensemble. Miller, in real life the wife of the show's co-creator Bill Lawrence, is a natural-born scene stealer who manages to make Jimmy's control freak next-door neighbor Liz not only endearing, but truly lovable.

The other producer/co-creator, Brett Goldstein – best known for his iconic role on “Ted Lasso” – steps in front of the cameras for season 2. No spoilers here, other than to say the new guy will never be mistaken for Roy Kent. No effen way.

Being in the psychology profession, “Shrinking” brings a nonjudgmental perspective to this confusing business of being human. Like the old cliché, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry … often at the same time. The most recent episode ended with Angie McMahon singing the refrain of “Letting Go”:


It's okay, it's okay,

    Make mistakes, make mistakes,

It's okay, it's okay …


“Shrinking” is about what damaged goods humans are, and how to find ways of forgiving ourselves for the messes we make of things.

You don't have to give yourself permission to love the show. It just comes naturally.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Last line of the last song

Image
                                                                 In Hana, late 1990s. Lisa Kristofferson photo When the Rolling Stone story showed up on my phone Sunday afternoon, it felt like the last line of the last song of a magnificent playlist. Kris Kristofferson was dead at 88. The luminous obituary of the “American Renaissance man” was hardly unexpected.  More than a decade earlier, in “Feeling Mortal” Kris wrote of  “ That old man there in the mirror And my shaky self-esteem Here today and gone tomorrow That's the way it's got to be With an empty blue horizon For as far as I can see.” That empty blue horizon could have been the view from the home on a hill in Hana where he lived for decades with his wife Lisa, raising a bunch of kids.  At the end of 50 miles of two-lane road clinging to cliffs above rocky Pacific beaches, passing lush jungles and postcard-perfect waterfalls, Hana is Maui's Brigadoon. An achingly gorgeous hamlet in Paradise, a place that stops time
Read more

Maestro

Image
                          Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in “Maestro.”  Jason McDonald/Netflix photos via IMDE.com. An old adage holds that meeting an idol isn't always a good idea, if you don't want to be disillusioned. That's the takeaway from “Maestro,” a penetrating portrait of monumental musical artist Leonard Bernstein, starring, directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper. Considering how much sublime beauty and exuberant joy he brought to the world as a conductor, composer and concert pianist, “Lenny's” life offstage was a glorious mess. Darkness and unrequited hunger in his psyche counterbalanced the soaring highs he shared with adoring audiences. Spanning three decades beginning in 1946, Cooper's ambitious epic follows the artist's meteoric rise and reign in concert halls around the world. His accomplishments extended to theatrical stages (“West Side Story”) and screens large and small,  including his Young People's Concert series in the new mediu
Read more

Killers of the Flower Moon

Image
Lily Gladstone (second from left) with Cara Jade Myers, Janae Collins and Jillian Dion.  Photos via IMDB Not since “Oklahoma!” opened on Broadway has the state where I grew up in the '50s and '60s gotten so much attention in popular culture. That's not necessarily a good thing. Ken Burns's recent PBS documentary “The American Buffalo” followed the rise and demise of the majestic beasts across a boundless landscape being transformed in a nation. Their fate was intertwined with the fate of Native Americans, a lot of whom, along with a lot of buffalos, wound up in Oklahoma. A horrendous 1921 race riot in Tulsa provided the opening scenes of the recent HBO miniseries “Watchmen.” And now comes “Killers of the Flower Moon,” recounting yet one more unconscionable chapter that wasn't in the books or libraries when I was learning Oklahoma history in school.  The tragic, three-and-a-half-hour epic follows the diabolical scheming by white men in what was called “Indian Territo
Read more