After a few bumps, Shrinking lands its season 1 finale

And so Shrinking comes to an end, not with a bag nor with whimper but with a boop. But we’ll get to that final scene soon enough. (Don’t worry, I won’t make any crass cliffhanger jokes! Well, maybe just that one.)

I may have spent the better part of these recaps giving the team behind Shrinking grief for their arbitrary attempts at bringing its disparate characters together. Operating as equal parts workplace comedy and family sitcom—both subgenres that structurally already spell out why the main characters all hang around one another in specific spaces: the office and the home—Shrinking seemed to slowly realize that, if it was to work, it needed to keep threading its ensemble no matter how outrageous the reason. This is one reason why this season finale works so well. A wedding (and a cornhole bachelor party), after all, is a perfect excuse to gather everyone we’ve come to care for over the course of nine previous episodes. And when the chemistry between your cast is that good (truly, what an ensemble!), I can’t blame them for such arbitrary plot entrapments.

Much like the season as a whole, Shrinking’s season finale anchored its comedic and emotional heart on Jason Segel. The actor, best known for his work on How I Met Your Mother, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and The Muppets has long excelled at an earnestness that’s never cloying, a kind of masculine fragility that’s surprisingly endearing. That was on full display here in “Closure.” The wedding speech alone, which oscillated between a cringey roast and a doe-eyed emotional screed was Shrinking (and Segel!) at his best, especially as it espoused what emerged as the thesis statement of the show: “The best way to help yourself was to help others.” The caveat, of course, and what has led me to stay cool on the show’s message, is that how we help others can sometimes be just as important as the fact that we do. Thus, no matter how lovely this platitude sounds when it’s coming from Segel’s mouth, all I kept thinking was that it was shortchanging the very ethos of not just the show as a whole but of mental-health professionals like Paul and Gabby.

Both of whom, it must be noted, are making inroads into building new lives for themselves—the former while sleeping with his doctor and the latter by pursuing a teaching career. Both have come a long way from where they started; Paul has thawed quite a bit, and Gabby has toughened up in turn. And look at them now! Hydrating together and playfully bantering back and forth.

Also moving onwards and feeling better than ever? Sean. Talk about new beginnings: He’s set to become an entrepreneur. Only a few months back he was an unemployed vet refusing to deal with his PTSD. Jury’s out on whether he’s made all that much progress on that part of his life, but outwardly, at least, Sean’s in a much better place.

Similarly, “Closure” offered Alice exactly what the episode title suggests. Jimmy may clearly be ready to move forward in—if not past—his grief, but Alice is finding ways to bring herself to move on in her own way (like by wearing Tia’s heels and embracing that she can still mourn her mother without letting that stop her from enjoying her life). Father and daughter seemed like they’re on the right track…so long as nothing quite as disruptive as, say, having Jimmy start a relationship with his late wife’s BFF.

Which: Oy. I didn’t enjoy their pairing right off the gate and I remain unconvinced this far in. I guess all that talk about “safe dick” would end up biting Gabby in the ass. She’s clearly falling for Jimmy. He’ll likely enjoy knowing he’s no longer “safe dick.” How he’ll react to maybe being more? Unclear.

But back to that final boop, which was, arguably, more of a bombshell than Gabby’s admission to Liz about how Jimmy makes her feel.

When the montage began playing and we saw everyone giddily dancing at the wedding as Jimmy’s many patients were seen, if not thriving, at least making moves toward bettering their lives, I worried about the message Shrinking was going to leave us with. Was the entire season proof that Jimmy’s unorthodox gambles had actually paid off? That his meddling had, indeed, done more good than he and Paul feared? And then we saw Grace (hiking, of course!), who seemed to have made the most 180 turn of them all, a person who found a way to take in Jimmy’s advice and yet keep her relationship with her boyfriend going. Watching her snap turned out to be a great narrative cliff-hanger; here is the pilot episode blown up. It’s both a call back and an attempt to up the ante. Now that we know season two is officially happening, we can sleep soundly knowing we will find out how and whether Jimmy will have to grapple with Grace’s choice and how he’ll handle the consequences of what turned out to be hilariously ill-fitting advice that, all in all, did more harm than good.

I’m cautiously excited about the show taking this dark a turn but given that the finale also teed up Gabby to start teaching and Sean and Liz to team up on his catering business—not to mention giving Harrison Ford, I mean Paul, an out out for his life in Pasadena—I worry we might be getting a whole different kind of show when it returns.

Stray observations

• I swear to god if they go hiking one more time…. (But at least we entered “shirtless Brian” era?)
• Speaking of Brian: the pearls detail on the grooms? Divine.
• “Are you sad because he was so kind to you?” Honestly, if there’s one line that hit home more than any other and which showed just how attentive to the human experience Shrinking can sometimes be, it was this one. (Seriously, kudos to Christa Miller for so carefully rounding out what could easily have been a shrewish wife of a role and for even pulling off self-aware lines like “I can be a lot” which are both hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.)
• A Harrison Ford hug! What a concept!
• “It’s like Mariah Carey hitting that high note good.” More of Jessica Williams impersonating Mariah, please.
• This is a dad joke show! I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to come to this realization. It’s not just that Jason Segel delivers peak dad content (that dancing!) or that Jessica Williams has yet to meet a low hanging fruit joke she can’t deliver skillfully (“rocks are not the only things she knows how to polish” heyooo!). Or that, you have Harrison Ford basically playing himself as a grouchy father figure (and doing it oh so well). It’s that, tonally, Shrinking is a dadcom, an heir apparent to a show like Ted Lasso, where corny humor is seen as the worthy antithesis to toxic masculinity. What better figure to build a show like that than a cringey dad?