Shrinking

Jason Segel plays Jimmy, a Pasadena therapist whose wife died a year ago and whose grief has turned him into a shambling wreck: sleeping with sex workers on the lawn, ignoring his teenage daughter Alice, phoning in his practice. In the opener he snaps and starts breaking the cardinal rule of the job — telling patients exactly what he thinks they should do with their lives. His mentor Paul, a old-school psychiatrist recently diagnosed with Parkinson's, watches this with escalating horror. Harrison Ford plays Paul. Jessica Williams plays their colleague Gaby, Michael Urie is the neighbor Brian, and Lukita Maxwell plays Alice. Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein created it for Apple TV+.

Harrison Ford is genuinely funny here, which nobody had any right to expect after forty years of him growling through action movies. He's doing timing. He's doing reaction shots. He's clearly having a good time and it reads. Jessica Williams walks away with entire scenes — she's the sharpest presence in the ensemble and gets the best lines. Segel writes and plays a very specific kind of sad-guy shtick that works because he's willing to look pathetic instead of lovable-sad. The Bill Lawrence house style (Scrubs, Ted Lasso) is all over the pacing: quick jokes, soft landings, characters who actually like each other. When it wants to punch you in the throat with a grief beat, it can.

It wants to be liked. Badly. Conflicts get resolved inside the same episode by a warm speech, everyone hugs, next week we do it again. If you found Ted Lasso saccharine, this is that recipe with a therapy license. The premise — therapist blows up his career by giving unfiltered advice — is mostly abandoned within a few episodes because the writers care more about the found-family vibe than the ethical grenade they lit in the pilot. Some plotlines involving the neighbor and Alice's friends feel workshopped down to sitcom shapes. Occasionally a scene stops so a character can deliver the moral, cleanly, at conversational volume.

If you liked Ted Lasso, Scrubs, or the softer stretches of This Is Us, you're the target. It's a hang show with real actors and a grief engine underneath. If your taste runs to The Bear, Succession, or anything with sharper teeth, the emotional tidiness will grate by the third episode. People who dislike therapy-speak in general will find the entire show is therapy-speak. Anyone hoping the premise of a therapist going off the rails becomes a genuinely dark show should look elsewhere; the darkness is decorative.

WORTH IT because the craft holds up its ambitions. Ford is doing real work, Williams is a discovery for anyone who missed her earlier stuff, and Segel is writing to his own strengths. The dialogue is funny at a per-minute rate most half-hours don't hit. It sermonizes occasionally — about grief, about therapy, about being a better man — but it mostly earns those beats through character rather than announcing them, and when it does hit the pulpit it's brief. This isn't a great show. It's a good show that a lot of very talented people clearly wanted to make, and you can feel that in every scene. Put it on. Enjoy Ford being pleasant for once.