Everything I know about therapy I’ve learned from television, so I can’t say whether the methods in “Shrinking,” which premiered Friday on Apple TV+, are any more or less accurate than what I know from “The Bob Newhart Show” or “The Sopranos.” Then again, I don’t know how true “The Sopranos” was to mob life in northern New Jersey. We make allowances.
Jason Segel, a co-creator with “Ted Lasso‘s” Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, stars as Jimmy, a cognitive behavioral therapist, to go by the sign outside the building where he works. He shares offices with his mentor, Paul, played by Harrison Ford, and Gaby, played by Jessica Williams — in that respect, both Jimmy and Segel are lucky men. But whatever good there is in Jimmy’s life has been driven from his mind by the accidental death of his wife a year before, a year he has apparently spent drugging, drinking and inviting young women over for late night swims and who knows what in his semi-posh Pasadena pool — never mind that his alienated teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), is asleep, or not, inside. The hangdog expression he habitually wears he describes as “resting dead wife face.”
Is Jimmy a good therapist? (He quotes Carl Jung, anyway.) It’s hard to tell. If he were a responsible one he’d have taken a sabbatical and sent his clients elsewhere, because if this is how he’s doing after a year, one wonders how he was getting on at three or six or nine months. (To start, he generally looks to have just rolled out of bed, hungover — in a twist beginning, we take him for the patient and not the therapist.)
