[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Shrinking” Season 2, Episode 12, “The Last Thanksgiving.”]
What is “Shrinking” without Jimmying? After two seasons watching Jason Segel’s frustrated therapist push his patients to stop moping on the couch and start moving on with their lives (in a desperate bid to make up for his own failures as an absentee dad), it looks like we’re about to find out.
Thank goodness.
In an essential, hard-earned gesture of humility, the “Shrinking” Season 2 finale sees its star asking his daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), for forgiveness, and in doing so, asks the audience for the same. He knows he screwed up. He knows he needs to say he’s screwed up, and he does so, thoroughly and earnestly.
While a solid climax to a season built around repairing Jimmy’s prominent character flaws, what makes the scene so fascinating is that it’s refuting the very premise of “Shrinking.” Here’s a show ostensibly about “a grieving therapist who breaks the rules, ignoring his training and ethics, to make huge, tumultuous changes in people’s lives,” and he comes to find out that a) he was driven to do so for the wrong reasons and b) in general, ignoring your ethics when trying to help people in crisis is a bad idea.
It’s far from revelatory, but it is correct and curious — the kind of speech you give in a series finale, not when you’re just getting started: Jimmy needed to own up to his mistakes, but now that he has… what’s “Shrinking” Season 3 going to look like?
A few clues can be found in how we got to Jimmy’s big moment (a moment, I must say, that’s almost immediately overshadowed by Paul’s big moment, which better earn Harrison Ford his first Emmy). Over the first half of Season 2, it was clear Bill Lawrence’s weepy Apple TV+ sitcom was keen on making amends. Most of the criticisms facing Season 1 were directed toward Jimmy, a character introduced swimming with sex workers in his backyard pool, high as a kite, while his teenage daughter slept inside. Some viewers struggled to see him as an affable authority figure: a dad who’s having a hard time, and a doctor who’s really trying to help his patient. Instead, he looked like what he was: a widower lost in a sea of grief, threatening to drag down the innocent people around him (or, as it were, shove them off a cliff).
So Season 2 course corrects. Early on, Paul (Harrison Ford) sits Jimmy down for a good talking to: He replaces Jimmy as Sean’s (Luke Tennie) primary therapist, which gives their codependent relationship much-needed distance, and he urges Jimmy to follow the guidelines of traditional therapy. Jimmy struggles with both directives, but notices improvements with Sean under Paul’s care. That plus the sudden arrival of a ghost from his past push Jimmy toward self-reflection: He has to confront Louis, the man responsible for his wife’s death (played by “Shrinking” co-creator and “Ted Lasso” Emmy winner Brett Goldstein), and then he has to confront his own behavior in the aftermath of that loss.
After nearing a relapse, Jimmy manages to reach out to Paul instead, which is how the finale begins. “You’re never going to forgive yourself for shitting the bed as a father until you bare your soul to Alice,” Paul says. “She might still blame you, but it’s the act of revelation that’s healing. […] It’s about you admitting what you did and why it was wrong.”
Understandably, it takes Jimmy a bit to accept the truth in Paul’s advice, but when he does, he doesn’t back down. He sits Alice down and explains exactly why he’s so wrecked right now. “Kid, every parent likes to believe that if something bad ever happens, they are going to rise to the occasion,” he says. “I certainly believed that about myself. I thought I was going to be the hero, that I would be your hero. And I was not. So when Louis came back into our lives, he was like this walking, talking reminder for me of how I just really let you down when you needed me the most.”
Jimmy says he can’t get past the idea that Alice is the amazing person she is “in spite of” Jimmy, not because of him; that he’s a terrible dad, and all he can offer is his sincere apology for not being “better.” Alice, proving the first part of his claim while rejecting the second, agrees that he fucked up after her mom died, but reminds him of all the good he did before then and how hard he’s been trying over the last year or so.
“After mom died, during the worst times, there was this one night when I was really tired after practice and I passed out on the couch,” Alice says. “In the morning, I woke up, and I was in my room. Even at your lowest, you still carried me upstairs. That let me know that you were still in there.”
Their heart-to-heart sagely addresses the issues between both characters while simultaneously alleviating the audiences’ concerns. Jimmy accepts responsibility for the mistakes we’ve seen him make, while Alice reminds us that those mistakes weren’t the sole defining aspects of her dad. It’s a slick bit of pseudo-retconning — highlighting previously overlooked aspects of his personality while trying to get past the prominent parts of which we’re all too aware or reframing Jimmy more than revising his past.
What the scene doesn’t do is speak directly to Jimmy’s newfound therapeutic techniques — not that it needs to. For one, in the previous episode, when Jimmy was on the verge of a relapse, Paul cautioned Jimmy against falling back into his old habits, even if they didn’t involve hard drugs and sex workers.
“So what are you gonna do?” Paul asks after Jimmy says he won’t be calling Paul for help. “Are you gonna find some other patient to make all better? Because I know you’re jonesing for a fix and this is your drug. But take it from somebody who knows: The drug wears off.”
Here, Paul is telling Jimmy that “Jimmying” isn’t the answer. He recognizes that Jimmy’s sudden need to fix his patients through fast, decisive action isn’t for their benefit but for his. Of course, that doesn’t stop Jimmy from seeking out Wally (Kimberly Condict) — a woman who found a neighbor’s dog and decided to keep him — and forcing her to return Bandit to his rightful owner. Once again, Jimmying works out for the best, but it doesn’t make Jimmy happy — not in a sustainable way, at least.
So… what does this mean for “Shrinking” Season 3? If Jimmying is dangerous and driven by Jimmy’s own demons, shouldn’t he stop? Shouldn’t his grand experiment be over? Probably not. After all, in addition to Wally, plenty of good has come from Jimmying. Sean wouldn’t be the happy small-business owner he is today without Jimmy’s abnormal interventions. Grace (Heidi Gardner) wouldn’t be free from her abusive husband (even if she also wouldn’t have shoved him off a cliff and spent time in prison). Dan (Mike C. Nelson) wouldn’t have been able to survive the stress of his best friend’s wedding, and Louis might not be here at all. (Season 2 ends with Jimmy showing up as Louis contemplates jumping in front of a train.)
Clearly, something about Jimmying is still working, even if “Shrinking” Season 2 went the extra mile to show what makes it so perilous. I’m guessing Jimmy will keep pushing boundaries in Season 3, albeit to less extremes (and likely under additional supervision from Paul). But without its weight hanging over “Shrinking,” Season 3 has room to be whatever it wants. As Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall notes, Bill Lawrence loves pivoting from a faulty high-concept premise to an easygoing hang-out comedy, and “Shrinking” thrives when its ensemble’s many interwoven arcs are shared more evenly. While I’ll always have my qualms about how it got here, now that Jimmy’s checked his baggage, maybe “Shrinking” can grow into its best self.
Grade: B+
“Shrinking” is available on Apple TV+. The series has been renewed for Season 3.
