‘Shrinking’ Season 2 Premiere Review: Growing or Shrinking? | Art

After a 19-month hiatus, “Shrinking” is now airing its second season. A few months after the events of season 1, we continue to follow protagonist Jimmy, played by Jason Segel, in his struggles as a grieving widow, single father and unconventional therapist. But this season, compared to last, the show’s story seems to be deviating from an exclusive focus on Jimmy, instead exploring the other characters in his life: neighbors, colleagues, patients, and of course, his daughter.

Episode one of the second season opens with visiting Grace, played by Heidi Gardner, a patient of Jimmy’s who is in prison after pushing her abusive boyfriend off a cliff. This is a seamless transition as the Season 1 finale ended with that shocking event. That said, the continuation of Grace’s story seems unnecessary and falls flat. In the first three episodes, the only notable patients that Jimmy sees are Grace and Sean, played by Luke Tennie.

This trend seems to differ from Season 1, where Jimmy continuously visited various patients, with a particular focus on Grace and Sean. Sean, a nuanced character who shows promising development in working through his anger issues and excelling in the world, bonds with many of the other main characters in the new season. It makes sense to incorporate Sean further into season two—not only is he meaningful to the story, but his connections with the rest of the cast add warm and fascinating commentary to unexpected friendships. However, Grace reads as a one-dimensional character who is harder to empathize with.

The entire first season used Grace as an example of Jimmy’s over-involvement in his patients’ lives, with her rash and violent decision in the season finale affecting Jimmy deeply. Her story was helpful in providing a transition to the second season and a wake up call for Jimmy to restore a more professional relationship between therapist and patient, but this does not deserve the amount of screen time that Grace is allotted. Her scenes generally feel awkward and out of place, and would have felt more effective if the writers established that Jimmy made a mistake and showed him correcting that mistake in his interactions with new patients.

Jimmy’s lack of new patients—and, moreover, the absence of most of his old patients—signals a shift in the show’s focus from Jimmy dealing with his grief vicariously through others to dealing with it on his own. This season, he actually begins to process the loss of his wife and openly reminisces about his memories of her. Most importantly, he does this without doing anything completely irrational, which was his usual course of action in the first season. In the coming episodes, we can see Jimmy deal directly with his grief in a more healthy way.

On the other hand, Jimmy’s daughter, Alice, played by Lukita Maxwell, who last season struggled to trust and forgive her father after his destructive spiral, now finds herself in a spiral of her own. Faced with the possibility of meeting and interacting with the drunk driver who killed her mother, she understandably struggles to express her thoughts and feelings in any way other than violent rage. With her father past that stage in his own grieving journey, it looks like season two will see Alice in a very similar situation to where Jimmy was at the beginning of the show. In this, season two seems to be setting up to explore the differences in how a teenager and an adult deal with a similar loss.

The first few episodes of season two have already set up important storylines not just for Jimmy, but for many of the show’s main characters. “Shrinking” expands the subject of grief to include how different generations can cope with it. For example, Grace and her neighbor Connor, played by Gavin Lewis, seem to have a budding relationship that may be complicated by a love triangle with Grace’s best friend. Sean continues to struggle with being a veteran, encouraged by others to face his fears of facing his old life head on, while still focusing on building his new life in the form of his food truck with Jimmy’s neighbor, Liz ( Christa Miller). Jimmy and his colleague Gaby, played by Jessica Williams, continue their will-they-won’t-they relationship in the first few episodes as Gaby deals with a career change into academia, a desire for something more in her romance , and stress of moving into a new house. Finally, Jimmy’s colleague Paul, played by Harrison Ford, continues to battle Parkinson’s disease while grappling with the reality of aging while still in a budding romance with his doctor, Julie, played by Wendie Malick.

Overall, “Shrinking” expands its focus to include topics about generational difficulties that change with age, hoping to keep viewers engaged in an expanded world and story. That said, the overall vibe of the show remains the same — “Shrinking” is about kind gestures and lifting each other up. Season two is a refreshing and humane take on dealing with dark subjects, all while portraying the complications of relationships in a realistic and humorous way.