At the heart of Shrinking is a simple truism: All of us (therapists included) struggle with how to be good people. And sometimes, as many of the characters in this Jason Segel/Harrison Ford comedy do in this latest episode, that involves yelling out “Fuck you!” to those we love the most.
It’s that fuck-you attitude that opens the episode as Jimmy (Segel) tries to talk some sense into Donny (Tilky Jones). As it happens, the once-abusive husband who was thrown off a cliff by his wife, Grace (Heidi Gardner), has no time for conciliatory language—not when he’s still in physical therapy hoping to regain walking capabilities. He cusses out Jimmy and storms away. It means Jimmy doesn’t have the best news when he and Brian (Michael Urie) go visit Grace in prison, as she awaits word from the county as to whether the charges will be dropped or not. The two encounter a despondent woman who’s all too resigned to paying for the horrid thing she did. And not even learning the charges are dropped gets her to perk up. She believes she should be punished. What has the world come to if she can’t pay for trying to kill her abusive husband? (Note: This is a rather sunny vision of the American justice system, which doesn’t, IRL, seem to be so lenient to women in Grace’s position.)
Back at Jimmy’s office, and with her sister in tow, Grace insists she can’t really forgive herself for what she did—a challenge Jimmy is all too eager to take up. Because, of course, there’s no part of a patient’s life this therapist is not eager to meddle with. But all of that gets threaded with a simmering rift between Jimmy and Brian, a tiff that began when Brian realized his BFF hadn’t shared anything about his on-and-off hookups with Gaby (Jessica Williams) and which he’s now clung to as proof the two of them aren’t really all that close.
I’ll admit that little subplot felt particularly thin, an excuse to give Urie and Segel a chance to volley off one another insults (and a slap!) that were nevertheless designed to bring them together as they help Grace move on—something made all the harder when they see she’s gone back to Donny, thinking that caring for him in his current state is the atonement she needs. Ultimately, it’s Brian who manages to knock some sense into Grace when he shares the many character witness statements he’d gathered for the court where everyone had noted how selfless Grace could be and how that part of her had long been dimmed and wounded by Donny. In an all-too-tidy conclusion to her storyline, Grace seemingly painlessly extricates herself from Donny and heads up to Vancouver with her sister in a moving van. Tidy and neat seem to be how Shrinking balances out those “fuck yous” that litter its storylines this season.
Meanwhile, Gaby may continue to direct her ”fuck yous” at Jimmy (how civil and collegiate!), but, just like Grace, Jimmy resigns himself to letting his former flame and friend cool off as they reorient their relationship once more. Then again, Gaby is busy teaching and doling out advice to Liz (Christa Miller), who is suddenly eager to become a better person—only sometimes, though. She’s seen firsthand how proud of Sean (Luke Tennie) his father was. In her eyes, she’s come in between a father and son’s dream of owning a food truck together and so, with Gaby’s unwitting guidance around “psychological egoism,” Liz does what she thinks is best for everyone involved: She sells her share of the truck to Sean’s dad.
This, of course, doesn’t really go all that well. In her attempt to do good, Liz forgets, perhaps, that the main thing to know about helping others is that they may actually want a say in how you help them. It’s why Sean responds so angrily to her gesture of presumed goodwill: She gets a “Fuck you!” of her own, which leaves her reeling.
It’s but one example of how hard of a time these characters are going through as they try to be good and good to one another. Take Paul (Ford), who’s seeing his romance with Dr. Julie (Wendie Malick) bloom more and more. He’s worried, of course, that his Parkinson’s will get in the way of their relationship, especially since she already lived through helping her husband with his dementia. (He’s now in a home and seems not too flustered when visited by Julie and Paul.) It takes a talking to from Liz’s husband (Ted McGinley’s Derek), of all people, to set him straight. Sometimes the best way to make a partnership work is to let some things go; eventually Paul agrees that he’ll need a new doctor, allowing for his and Julie’s connection to better flourish.
Prickly, stubborn Paul has long been a favorite of mine in the Shrinking world. It’s not just that Ford has found a way to leverage his curmudgeon persona to create a warm yet still abrasive character but that he is, amid the craziness around him, the straight man this comedy often needs.
It makes sense he’s such a good listener, the kind Alice (Lukita Maxwell) would turn to when trying to make sense of how best to approach knowing the guy who killed her mom (Brett Goldstein’s drunk-driver-turned-barista Louis). She’s written a letter to him (filled with “fuck yous,’ naturally). But that’s clearly not been enough to exorcize her feelings about him. She promises Paul she won’t go see him. But, as ever, a therapist’s advice goes unheeded. (That may well be the most realistic part of Shrinking.)
She visits him at his place of work, where a wounded Louis fumbles through trying to make sense of finally being in front of the daughter of the woman he killed. She can’t even muster a response beyond “fuck you!” before storming off. All she has is anger, which is a feeling that can easily overwhelm all our other (and better) intentions/behaviors.
Anger can be a catalyst for much-needed change (Jimmy decides to drop in on Brian and his husband after getting slapped to improve their friendship), but it can also just be a self-destructive force, which is precisely what we witness once Alice pleads with Connor (Gavin Lewis) to kiss her as a way to forget herself in someone else’s arms. No good will come of this, of course, since Connor has become an item with Alice’s BFF, Summer (Rachel Stubington). Or will it?
Stray observations
- • The song that caps off the episode may give a hint as to how we’re supposed to apprehend what’s happening with Alice but also with everyone in the show: “I’ve been learning ’bout letting go,” Angie McMahon croons. “How to do it without my claws,” she goes on, before she dives into the chorus: “It’s okay, it’s okay, make mistakes, make mistakes.” And really, isn’t that how we all learn?
- • Avid sitcom TV watchers may have noticed that Sean and Liz’s truck was parked outside of a very familiar building: Pasadena’s City Hall. If you don’t know, it served as Pawnee’s City Hall in Parks And Recreation.
- • “Orange is the new snack” made me cackle more than I should admit (as did Gaby’s “Suck my dick, you big dumb bitch”).
- • At some point, I’ll stop belaboring the point of holding Shrinking to task for not accurately depicting therapists’ work but Paul outright telling the audience that one thing therapists do is tell their patients what to do is a brazen misconstruction of what therapy is all about. And yet it’s central to how Hollywood understands what happens in those sessions.
- • Gaby teaching Liz about “psychological egoism” made me miss The Good Place, which did such a better job at incorporating such didactic lessons about how to be good in the guise of sitcom B-plots.
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