Shrinking delivers one sucker punch of a climax

Oh boy. Oh boy, indeed.

Listen, at least the team behind Shrinking is rightly aware that shipping Jimmy and Gabby (Jason “I play anxious nice guy who’s actually a selfish prick sometimes well” Segel and Jessica “I can and will have great comedic chemistry with everyone around me” Williams) is not a great idea. Not from a character arc standpoint and definitely less so from a sitcom narrative one. They’re colleagues! He’s still grieving! She was his late wife’s best friend! He’s clearly a mess! She’s getting a divorce! How many more red flags do we need to see before their late night drunken affair wherein they both were “some dirty slut pigs” is understood as a cheap ploy to get Jimmy to reassess his entire approach to life and work?

If it sounds like we seem to do this every episode…well, that’s because “Jimmy comes to an epiphany about how he’s mishandling his life” may well be the governing recurring principle behind Shrinking. Last week I joked that the Gabby/Jimmy kiss/hookup was playing into well-worn sitcom tropes—and I admit that may be giving this one-off too much importance. But then I see the cyclical nature of Jimmy’s character arc and I am convinced yet again that, no matter its single-cam trappings, Shrinking is as beholden to sitcom rules. Namely, character development is slow and clipped, if existent at all. This is why sitcom characters constantly feel stuck in their own looped plots; this is a genre that seemed almost preternaturally averse to change. How else to depend on solid catchphrases and repeated pratfalls if not by them being tied to folks who behave the same way day in and day out?

Have I arrived, then, at the main reason why I’ve so been struggling with Shrinking this entire season? After all, therapy—and the work required to improve one’s mental wellbeing—depends on change. On making better informed choices when what you’ve been doing (for weeks, months, years, even!) has clearly not been working. And Shrinking, try as it might, looks like it’s stuck in a loop. Not the kind that accurately depicts the way grief can ensnare us into not moving forward (though there’s that). But the kind that forces someone like Jimmy to lose all sense of self-awareness…until the end of an episode where he’ll have an epiphany, only to struggle with it the next one.

At least this latest one (that he’s a selfish guy who’s taken for granted those around him who have been caring for him) gave us more fun Segel/Williams banter. Oh, and a signature Segel nudity moment that couldn’t help but echo his iconic Forgetting Sarah Marshall scene. But wait, about that epiphany: Why hadn’t he realized this last time when he apologized to Liz for helping out with Alice? Or when he understood that he actually cherished Paul’s advice?

Anyway. Maybe I should focus on the positive, like how both Gabby and Jimmy and Sean and Alice handled their awkward party mishaps with maturity. They talked through why they felt so uncomfortable the day after and then, just… went their merry ways. And just as I typed that out and almost went to complain about how neatly both storylines were tied by episode’s end, I remembered that this episode was eclipsed by the single best scene in Shrinking’s short history so far.

I was right to be excited to see that Lily Rabe would be coming back to reprise her role of Meg, Paul’s daughter. Mostly because, as she’s shown time and time again (in, say, American Horror Story), she’s a fearless performer who’ll giddily dig into comedy and drama with equal poise. Here, as Harrison Ford’s scene partner, she delivers that and then some.

Paul’s Parkinson’s diagnosis has been mostly kept to the background, a way for Ford to get some good scenes in with both Michael Urie and Wendie Malick (his lawyer and doctor, respectively). But I didn’t expect it to deliver such a sucker punch of a climax. Paul—like Jimmy and all of Shrinking’s characters, actually—struggles with asking for help. His self-involvement, though, has been framed by the show until now as making him a tad antisocial but not for that any worse of a therapist. Finding himself unable to connect with Meg and even failing to see how refusing her kind offer would just dredge up decades of neglect was the best version of Shrinking I could envision. Here is a mental health professional all but stumbling when it comes to his own wellbeing, a father realizing that he wasn’t there for his daughter the way he should be. If Shrinking ends up factoring into next year’s Emmys, I wouldn’t be surprised to find “Apology Tour” ending up as Ford’s ticket to the ceremony (with, maybe a Rabe Guest Actress nod to go alongside it).

Now, can we get similarly melancholy and thorny storylines in the rest of the show?

Stray observations

• “Want to go for a walk?” See! I wasn’t making things up. Walking seems to be the only way these characters interact with one another; but have you ever met anyone who lives in Southern California who loves walking as much as Liz, Sean, and Brian do? At least Alice mixed it up this week and introduced us to her bike.
• I was already planning on commenting on the twee indie soundtrack that scores much of the show (apt, given its protagonist) and then this episode put Simply Red’s “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” as the centerpiece of a moving father/daughter moment and, well, it made me rethink whether I really wanted to nitpick the show’s music choices. Because if that song doesn’t move you in ways both cheesy and earnest, then know you are dead inside (or perhaps have better taste in music than I do).
• “Why do you have sadface?” “It’s just face.” (Don’t mind me, that’s just me silently going full on Regina George and whispering, “Stop trying to make sadface happen!” every time “sadface” is uttered by any character on Shrinking.)
• What is Shrinking doing with Sean? Other than being dangled as an example of how Jimmy is fumbling his practice and being equally dangled as an ill-suited love interest for Alice, we’ve gotten only bits and pieces of what’s really going on with him. Maybe the show will finally give him a job, or let us witness more of him and Jimmy’s therapy sessions. Because if not I worry he’ll end up feeling like a missed opportunity to turn him into a well-rounded character whose plots need not only serve the white family that’s housing him.
• We didn’t get a party this time around but we did get an impromptu BBQ. I fear that what we’re getting next as an excuse to bring all these disparate characters together with…a birthday dinner? A group hike? A karaoke outing? A conga line?