It’s a fiesta of laughs with heart and meaning! Enjoy …
Shrinking (E1, S10)
As someone who has experienced the incalculably awful of losing both parents with a 3.5 year period, grief is ever present.
Not as stingingly strong as it was when I first lost my dad in June 2016 and my mum in November 2019, but it’s always there, with the greatest challenge being how to transition out of the suffocating sense that all the joy and possibility has been sucked out of life.
You rationally know that’s not true, of course, but rationale and grief are not exactly common bedfellows and often it’s a simple case of waking up one day and finding yourself at a point where moving forward with your life doesn’t feel like a complete and utter betrayal of the people you love and lost.
These final two episodes of Shrinking‘s first superlative season explores with trademark wit and thoughtfulness what it’s like to reach that intangible place where there’s more life around you than death, where the future feels like it has more of a presence than the past and where taking steps into the future actually like something you can accomplish.
Aptly-titled, episode 9 “Moving Forward” sets everything up for the season finale where we see everyone taking their first tentative steps to forging a future where Tia (Lilan Bowden), the dead wife and mother of Shrinking‘s two characters, dad Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) and daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), isn’t the absolute centre of attention.
They’ll never forget her naturally and she was will always loom large in the best of ways over their lives, but after a season of grieving her, understandably, at every turn, Jason and Alice are able to take small steps towards those steps are leading towards.
No one’s quite sure but that’s okay; you don’t always have to start a journey knowing what the destination will be, especially when it’s one out of grief which comes with its own rules and non-linear timelines which don’t helpfully run on a neat A to B axis.
Proof positive of this is when Jimmy finally realises he can take off his wedding ring and box up all his wife’s clothes and photo albums, forgetting that Alice may not be at the exact same point.
Turns out she’s not, not at all, and she’s upset that he’s wiped Tia’s presence from the house; however, while Jimmy remembers Tia’s birthday and goes to the cemetery to spend time with her, Alice completely forgets, something that completely traumatises her.
How could she forget her mum’s birthday? What kind of cold soul does that, she reasons.
Jimmy tries to assure her it’s not a terrible thing she’s done but Alice, at first can’t forgive herself, her sorrow representative of some many others’ when something technically small suddenly feels like a whole universe of regret.
I recall dropping one of my mum’s wine glasses I’d brought home from her place when we were cleaning it out and crying for an hour at the loss; it didn’t matter that I had a number of other wine glasses or that I had so many memories tied to the set – I’d lost one of the glasses and the world had ended.
Alice does find a way to make her peace with her grief and does so in a remarkably beautiful and material way by wearing her mother’s favourite shoes to Jimmy’s BFF Brian (Michael Urie) wedding to his soulmate Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), an acknowledgement that while her mother may be gone, her presence in their lives can keep going in ways that are both sentimental and practical.
Gaby (Jessica Williams) too is moving on, making peace with her ex, applying for the professorship she believes she’ll be brilliantly at – her boss of sorts Paul (Harrison Ford) agrees and vouches for her in the most unorthodox and funny of ways; he also takes some major steps forward in prioritising family over work which warms the heart, especially during one key episode 9 reveal -and taking advantage of Jimmy’s “Safe Dick” (yeah they’re essentially f*ckbuddies but the wedding would suggest they’re on their way to being something more).
And even Jimmy’s live-in patient, PTSD-afflicted Sean (Luke Tennie) is realising his entrepreneurial dreams of being a food van chef, a development which underscores how far he has come (though we’ve yet to see if the PTSD has actually been dealt with in any long-term manner, an example of where Shrinking, good in so many other ways, does play fast-and-loose with psychological issues, often for the sake of humourous narrative convenience).
It’s all up and up in lots of ways but you suspect that even as Jimmy reminds the assembled guests at Brian and Charlie’s wedding that “The best way to help yourself was to help others”, that there’s going to still be a lot of obstacles and challenges ahead to fully integrate a grief-soaked past and present with a more hopeful and buoyant.
But that’s okay – that’s what second seasons are for and yes, we are getting one, with plans for a third season if that is greenlit, and with a terrific ensembles really hitting their paces (including Jimmy’s hilarious next door neighbours Liz and Derek (Christa Miller and Ted McGinley respectively)) and that (!!) cliffhanger ending where we discover one of Jimmy’s patients has taken his advice to extremes (“BOOP!”), Shrinking‘s second season is looking like it’ll be just as engrossingly funny and meaningful as its first.
Ted Lasso (S3, E1-3)
Oh, it’s good to be back at AFC Richmond!
There’s something ineffably wonderful about being back in the company of the titular football coach (played with appealingly goofy vulnerability by Jason Sudeikis), who even in the show’s third season feels a like sporting fish out of water (though, of course he still BELIEVEs), and the delightful ensemble who have grown around him, their pitch perfect performances encouraged by writing that feels at once both quirky and emotionally rich.
True, it’s far from plain sailing for anyone with club owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) battling it out with charmingly conniving ex and owner of rival club Rupert (Anthony Head) for star players and match placings – AFC may be back in the Premier League but staying there looks like a decidedly tenuous proposition, Ted struggling with his wife’s new guy (their ex-marriage therapist!) and the distance from his son and Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and Keeley (Juno Temple) not exactly kicking those relationship goals.
It’s a LOT but then that’s always been the way with a show that has happily kept multiple balls in the air at any one time and yet which has still felt relatively unhurried and sweetly charming in a deceptively intimate kind of way.
This is humour with HEART, and rather than feeling cheesy or saccharine which it most easily could have done, Ted Lasso, in the first three episodes of season 3 (purportedly the last one, sadly), feels as muscularly robust as ever, its endless tilt at whimsy and cheeky pop culture references (the which “Julie Andrews character are you?” is a gem) always leavened by an understanding that while life may be filled with bon mots and cosy moments of connection, it can also be a hard place to navigate.
Chief case in point comes not from Nathan (Nick Mohammed) in his turncoat role as coach at Rupert’s club (where he’s doing really nicely, thank you) – thankfully they have added nuance to him now so he’s less evil writ large in clumsily overwritten fashion and more an insecure git who’s frightened of imposter syndrome – but from — SPOILER ALERT!!! — one of the background team players Colin (Billy Harris) who it turns in one flirtatiously romantic scene to be gay.
Closeted, naturally, because even in the 21st century’s third decide the hyper masculinity of team sports is yielding to nothing that doesn’t fit the macho heteronormative mould, but gay, his references to how you spell “Grindr” in season 2 all making a lot more sense now.
While he makes no attempts to out himself in any way, shape or form – he goes as far to introduce his boyfriend as his “wingman” when the team gathers at Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) about-to-be-opened west African restaurant for a fun night out of good food and regret by Rebecca that she missed the boat on a gorgeous man – the fact that he’s gay in an environment where you’re not supposed to be (though I hope the team would embrace him, led, I suspect by Jamie Tartt, played by Phil Dunster, who’s comes a LONG way in three seasons) is going to make things very interesting going forward.
As is the presence of reporter Trent Crimm (James Lance) who is writing a book on the team and the recent arrival of star player Zava (Maximilian Osinki) who’s a narcissistic Buddhist football legend who does meteorically good things for AFC Richmond and who may turn out to be not so much of a prima donna after all (for the record, the team’s bubbly ray of sunshine, Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernández) has always happily embraced the man that everyone fangirl worships with comedic devotion).
For a quiet, Pollyanna-effervescent series which delights in its witty banter and clever wordplay between beautifully-realised characters, there’s a LOT going on, not least the idea that taking on titanic odds might seem like a fools’ errand in many ways but it’s actually amazingly incredibly brave.
Ted is sticking around in the UK coaching a sport he still admits he doesn’t fully “get”. Rebecca is taking
on her poisonous likeable ex in the turbocharged arena of Premier League football. Keeley has launched her own PR firm and is both daunted and thrilled by what lies ahead. And Roy? He’s saying “F**k …” a lot and wondering if he’s screwed up his personal life and if he should have left Chelsea, after all.
The genius part of Ted Lasso is that takes this huge array of dramatic things on the boil, all of which come with a lot of import and consequence and it wraps it all up in a great big smiling hug of a show that delights in humanity, in the ability of people to be their best in the worst situations.
And it does all that in these three episodes which are exquisitely well-balanced between pathos and joy, bright-spirited humour and the grinding bigness and banality of life and which reminds us that it is possible to find simply joy even in the midst of trials aplenty.
Ted Lasso season 3 is currently screening on AppleTV+
The Big Door Prize (S1, 1-4)
Life doesn’t really surprise as much as we’d like.
But then it does, and if the surprise if good, and let’s face it there’s a plethora of them that aren’t, it goes all out, really knocking it out of the park.
Such as when, I don’t know, a giant blue electronic machine with the word MORPHO on its outer plating appears randomly in the general store of a small US town called Deerfield, a place cosily and happily ordinary in every way … until that is a weird piece of softly glowing electronica appears and promises to reveal to everyone what their life potential is.
What an enticingly unsettling prospect, right?
In a world full of unknowns and all kinds of unpredictability, and what the hell am I going to do with my life is right up there, having a machine tell us what we can be is deliciously alluring, and so it is that the townspeople soon find themselves lined up outside and into the store, filling The Big Door Prize, based on the novel of the same name by M. O. Walsh, with feverish life-solved anticipation.
But as the protagonist of the piece, Dusty Hubbard (Chris O’Dowd) discovers, something that is ostensibly good and liberating might actually turn out to be nothing of the sort; well, at least, as it applies to your state of mind and contentment with life.
As the series opens, Dusty, son of an Irish man and an American mother – Cary Hubbard (Jim Meskimen) and Eloise Hubbard (Deirdre O’Connell) are a riot as parents who love each other but might just be better off apart if the machine has its way – is celebrating his 40th birthday with his wife Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), who is trying a little too hard to be HAPPY about life, and daughter Trina (Djouliet Amara), who’s all wisecracks and bonhomie but also deep-seated grief from a recent terrible loss.
On the surface, as he opens his 40 presents which includes a scooter and, oddly, a theremin, Dusty, who’s a teacher and a whistler (this is crucial), is content; he has a great job, wonderful family and the bliss of knowing he’s right where he needs and wants to be.
Until … well, until MORPHO, named after a blue butterfly that ushers in change (there are some other mythological references too) arrives to tell him he may not be blissfully happy, after all.
Cue all kinds of existential issues, not just for Dusty but the local priest, Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) and some other townsfolk such as bereaved teen Jacob (Sammy Fourlas) who, unlike Dusty’s wife, the local school principal and a host of others such as Cass’s best friend who is thrilled MORPHO has seemingly “reached down into my soul” and named her a storyteller, aren’t so sure all the knowledge is a good thing.
That’s the central emotionally thoughtful idea in The Big Door Prize which for all its existential weightiness and angst is actually sweet and light too.
Anchored by the superlative comic timing of O’Dowd who grants an everyday warmth and normalcy to a premise that is fantastically out there, The Big Door Prize is in essence a story of what happens when the unknown becomes the sort-of known – for all its obvious answers delivered on a small blue card, MORPHO remains maddeningly absent on the details, leaving it up to the recipient to fill in the details (and who’s to say they’re wrong?) – and people end up with more information about their lives, or rather their potential lives, than might be good for them.
What’s fascinating about the show, which is as light and humourously airy as it is darkly dramatic at times, is that it underscores how much people cling to signs and pointers and any semblance of a sure thing in a world manifestly short on them.
We live in a void of knowledge much of the time, and while we might have persuasive information at our fingertips to help us make good decisions, we can never be truly sure we’re nailing it.
MORPHO promises to change all that, but rather than boon, which is how most people enthusiastically treat it, it might just be the wild card architect of all kinds of chaos, not all of it good.
That’s what Dusty thinks, and his musing on what MORPHO might mean seeps into every last part of his life, disturbing his teaching of history at the local high school (where the school slogan, inspired by deer, is, rather hilariously “be part of the herd!”), his marriage and a host of other relationships, all undercut by the deeply alarming idea that his life might have nowhere left to go (when you see his card, that will all make perfect sense).
A delicately funny and meaningful show that knows its way to the human heart and what makes it tick, The Big Door Prize has a great deal of thoughtful fun with the idea that for all our longing for knowledge and answers, that we could actually be far better off not knowing things, and letting life, good and bad, go where it wills.
It might not be as sure a thing as a one or two-word answer on a small blue card in a cute envelope, but it might in the end be all the better for our wellbeing and happiness.
We’ll find out in the remaining 6 episodes with the series streaming on AppleTV+