By the time many of us reach the confusingly contradictory, dark and difficult, joyful and not messy wilds of unpredictable adulthood, we have been well and truly disabused of the notion that life is always going to be a smooth and easy ride.
With that warm and cosy slice of misplaced idealism shoved brutally aside, what we then realise we want, no, need, is a found family of friends and yes, actual flesh and blood family members who will have our back at all times.
So, even if life is a gothic horror show of blockbuster terrifying proportions, we can at least rely on the fact that we won’t face it alone.
But as the brilliantly-realised characters in Shrinking discover in the final seven episodes of a superlatively good season two, having those people front and centre and behind doesn’t mean things will be any easier.
In fact, there’s a very good chance they could be even worse at times since (a) no one is flawless and the possibility of being letdown remains no matter you love them and they love you, and (b) they might even be the cause of some of our troubles.
Ain’t life fun?
Yeah, it’s not; well, not all the time but through these seven final episodes, when among other things, the father and daughter at the heart of the series, therapist Jimmy Laid and Alice (Jason Segel and Lukita Maxwell respectively) have to grapple with meeting their wife/mother Tia’s (Lilan Bowden) drunk driving killer, Louis Winston (Brett Goldstein) and forming some kind of relationship with him, what comes to matter is how you get to the other side of traumas, big and small, and who you did it with and how.
There’s a lot of emotional weightiness to unpack in these episodes, but the great gift of Shrinking is that it does it with wit, sensitivity, thoughtfulness and a metric ton of empath, all wrapped up in storylines that could be sudsy in less than assured hands but which never end up feeling manipulative or twee.
At the heart of the show is a stellar, and we mean STELLAR, ensemble cast that includes the aforementioned Segel, who co-created the show with sitcom great Bill Lawrence and Goldstein, and Maxwell, Harrison Ford as Jimmy’s acerbically warmheated boss Paul, Jessica Williams as Gabrielle “Gaby” Evans who plays Jimmy’s witty, fun and relationship averse colleague, Christa Miller and Ted McGinley as Jimmy’s neighbours Derek and Liz and Michael Urie as Jimmy’s gay BFF Brian who may or may be comically high maintenance (spoiler alert: very, VERY high) and Luke Tennie as friend and former patient and army veteran Sean.
That’s a lot of Jimmy references there but it points to how much Jimmy anchors the show as a character who’s great at being a dad (mostly) and a therapist – Paul always says he’s just “good” but he’s not prone to waxing lyrical at the best of times; just ask girlfriend Julie (Wendie Malick in fine form) – but who, like the rest of us, isn’t always adept at judging what the best course of action is.
His judgement is, of course, still impaired by the grief he still feels, the sudden death of his wife lingering as an issue for him and Alice, it’s impact on their slowly improving day-to-day lives amplified in these episodes as they get to know Louis, who, it turns out, has had his life ruined by one night of catastrophically bad judgement.
The brilliance of Shrinking is that it doesn’t absolve Louis of his sins nor wave away Jimmy and Alice’s grief as if it’s nothing; at every well-judged, heart-tearing moment, the show sits with these characters in the messy, horrific aftermath of actions that cannot be taken back and consequences that can never be obviated.
They are all stuck with life as it is and much of the power of Shrinking comes from the fact that it never once minimises how life can go terribly wrong and how awfully it can affect us, immediately and for any amount of time afterwards.
Life can be utterly destructive, and Shrinking gets that with an emotional power and healing insightfulness that makes it rips your heart in recognition and then seal it up again, fixed but not entirely the same.
Everyone has issues on their plate in these seven episodes, some fleeting but intense, others lingering and endlessly impactful, but every single thing that comes up for these exquisitely well-realised characters is given its due and allowed to run its course in ways that add so much richness and authentic meaning to the storyline.
For all its emotional heft, Shrinking is also laugh out loud funny.
Helped along by dialogue so sharp and clever it could practically slice things, and comic timing of a cast who can handle any line thrown at them, Shrinking dances along to a tune which is riotously hilarious at times and fiendishly clever at others in its comic delivery at others.
Smart as is, the show is so well-written and the characters so well realised and performed that you never feel like here are people who couldn’t possibly be this funny or clever all the time; none of us are but this cast is and you totally buy it because Shrinking is just that well written.
Half the fun of watching these episodes is watching words bounce between the characters in situations light and frothy and hang meaningfully in the air as things get more emotionally weighty; every word has its place and they elevate a narrative that always feel real, no matter what’s going down.
With a third season already confirmed (though it’s likely to be the last; psst spinoffs are possible), Shrinking is a show that is getting better and better, literally by the episode, with everyone in the show on the way to somewhere good and wonderful but not without considerable pain and trauma along the way, all of them helped by being part of a wonderful huge network of found family which is on full and gloriously uplifting display in final episode, “The Last Thanksgiving” which offers happy endings aplenty while still sage and real about life which is exactly the way we want it to be.
Shrinking streams on AppleTV+