The comedy of “Shrinking” is initially a bit dire, as it coasts on some easy Jason Segel-isms while establishing his recently widowed therapist. Segel plays piano, he does an impression of Dracula a la “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” and generally has the towering puppy energy we’ve come to know him for. Worse enough, the series leans too hard on its initial pitch of “Bad Therapist,” showing him as a wounded party animal with little professional composure. So that the pilot can make him a concrete underdog, we become unable to understand if Jimmy is actually good at his hard-earned job. His gruff superior, Paul (Harrison Ford), is deeply unamused, and we get why.
Everyone on this show has a problem that’s become their weak spot. Even when Jimmy’s life is coming back together, he still has a strained relationship with his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), who barely talks to him, and has become closer with next-door neighbor Liz (Christa Miller). Alice was left alone to care for herself more or less after her mother died, which also made her closer to Paul. And Paul has a Parkinson’s diagnosis hidden from his daughter, too stubborn to be open to the help he needs. There are many interconnected relationships to be mended in this show, and much of its momentum comes from how allegiances can change throughout.
Things start to change when Jimmy starts working with a Black veteran named Sean (Luke Tennie), who has a penchant for violence when provoked, and who carries unspoken anger from his time in the military overseas. Jimmy starts to take some wild professional lunges—during a session, he decides they need to do something different, and poof, they are at a boxing gym. Jimmy thinks that fighting in a contained situation will help, but when Sean is faced with an altercation later that week, it puts Sean in jail overnight and gets him kicked out of his parents’ house. “Shrinking” can cause minor whiplash in how it goes from sweet to bracing jokes about racial optics, which Jimmy is clueless about. But it works to get “Shrinking” to a premise that only sounds like a chintzy sitcom premise when Sean moves in with Jimmy. It’s not good boundaries for a therapist and their patient, but “Shrinking” eventually finds a way to make it especially funny.