Shrinking Season 3 Review – Harrison Ford is the best thing about this unapologetically soapy show | television

SWell, there’s an abundance of television offered to us in the streaming age, with entire shows featuring A-list actors that only a couple of your friends have ever heard of and an even smaller number of people watching. Case in point: Apple’s Shrinking, a drama from Scrubs creator Ted Lasso about a grieving therapist who, instead of just nodding and looking sad, decides to be brutally honest with his patients.

Now in its third season, its shining star remains Harrison Ford, who plays protagonist Jimmy (Jason Segel), his grouchy but good-hearted boss. Maybe it’s better that it doesn’t exist in the big leagues: while Shrinking has its moments of greatness, the series is – by and large – an unapologetically soapy confection that is, like most sweet things, best enjoyed in moderation.

As Season 3 begins, we’re reunited with therapist Jimmy (a man who previously described himself as having a “dead wife face”), teacher Paul (Ford), and a group of slightly closer friends, family members, patients, and neighbors. After spending the final moments of Season 2 forgiving the drunk driver who killed his wife, it looks like Jimmy is ready to start rebuilding his life in earnest.

However, the writers have other plans: I’m all for restorative justice, but a break with drunk driver Louis (Brett Goldstein) is too weird, even for a character as needy as Jimmy. Meanwhile, Paul’s Parkinson’s symptoms worsen, prompting the mentor to become the mentee (“If you see me drowning,” Jimmy commands, “pull me up”). There’s change in the air, whether it’s Paul’s health issues, or Jimmy facing the prospect of an empty nest now that his daughter Alice (Luketa Maxwell) is off to college (not quite empty, of course, with former patient and military vet Sean, played by Luke Tenney, still living in his pool house). In case we don’t quite get the point, Segel explains it to us in the series opener: “Everyone around me seems to be full of joy lately… I keep getting beat up by the littlest things.”

What follows are 11 warm, inoffensive but undeniable episodes, weaving Paul and Jamie’s personal problems into B-plots about their wider friendship group and their health scares, adoption drama, creepy ex-girlfriends and useless adult children. Indeed, parent-child relationships underpin the series, not least Jimmy’s difficult history with his father, played by Jeff Daniels. There’s potential for something profound here, but as with many parts of Shrinking, the schmaltz is often so thickly shoveled that it feels as if you’re being told exactly what to feel and when.

When it’s on the right side of right, it works: big group scenes where the likes of fellow therapist Gabby (Jessica Williams), Jimmy’s former best friend Brian (Michael Urie) and neighbor Liz (Krista Miller) make the show quick-witted but relaxed, even as they frequently push each other’s boundaries. But the lack of boundaries is also one of the show’s biggest problems: the unsolicited advice, lying on each other’s beds in outerwear, and the fact that every character is inexplicably close to Alice. A lot of suspension of disbelief is required before we get to the therapy sessions.

Although it’s not Shrinking’s responsibility to be completely accurate, I find myself wondering if some of the plots here – therapists showing up at bars to find their clients, clients moving between different therapists in the same practice, therapists seeing multiple people from the same friendship group and so on – risk making a mockery of the profession. Whereas medical or legal dramas are often well-researched, Shrinking treats therapy merely as a synonym for conversation, rather than as particularly sympathetic dialogues (“It’s your watch,” Gaby says to a client she’s particularly exasperated with, “so you can stay involved!”). At times, it feels as if Ford — the show’s emotional anchor, who delivers a thoughtful but often devastating performance as Paul — is on a different show entirely.

However, there are a lot of smart observations about relationships here. Michael J. Fox performs excellently as Jerry, a fellow Parkinson’s disease patient who jokes that he might do dangerous jobs because of his frequent falls. But for a show about therapy, Shrinking is strangely afraid of going too deep. If this is the final season (there seems to be a hint of its triumph), it won’t all be in vain. But, like many shows in the streaming era, I’m not sure it will make its mark.

Shrink is on Apple TV now.