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

After a 19-month hiatus, “Shrinking” is now airing its second season. Picking up a couple of months after the events of season one, we continue to follow the main character Jimmy, played by Jason Segel, in his struggles as a grieving widow, single father, and unconventional therapist. However, in this season, compared to last, it appears as if the show’s storyline is straying from a sole focus on Jimmy, and instead further exploring the other characters in his life: neighbors, coworkers, patients, and of course, his daughter.

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

This trend appears to differ from season one, which continuously saw Jimmy’s visits to various patients, with a special focus on Grace and Sean. Sean, a nuanced character who shows promising development in working on his anger issues and excelling in the world, forms bonds with many of the other main characters in the new season. It makes sense to further incorporate Sean in season two — he is not only meaningful to the storyline, but his connections with the rest of the cast add warmth and fascinating commentary on unexpected friendships. Grace, however, reads as a one-dimensional character who is harder to empathize with.

The entire first season used Grace as an exemplum of Jimmy’s overinvolvement in his patients’ lives, with her rash and violent decision in the season finale profoundly impacting Jimmy. Her storyline was useful in providing a transition into the second season and a wake up call for Jimmy to reinstate a more professional therapist-patient relationship, but this does not merit the amount of screen time that Grace is allotted. Her scenes generally feel awkward and out of place, and they would’ve felt more effective if the writers established that Jimmy made a mistake and showed him fixing this mistake in his interactions with new patients.

Jimmy’s lack of new patients — and, additionally, the absence of most of his old patients — signals a shift in the show’s focus from Jimmy processing his grief vicariously through others to him handling it on his own. In this season, he starts to actually process the loss of his wife, and openly reminisces on his memories of her. Most importantly, he does this without doing something completely irrational, as was his usual course of action in the first season. In the coming episodes, we may see Jimmy handle his grief head-on in a more healthy manner.

On the flip side, Jimmy’s daughter, Alice, played by Lukita Maxwell, who struggled last season with trusting and forgiving her dad after his destructive spiral, is now finding herself in a spiral of her own. Faced with the opportunity to meet and interact with the drunk driver who killed her mom, she understandably struggles to express her thoughts and emotions in a manner other than violent rage. With her father past that stage in his own grief journey, it appears that season two will see Alice in a very similar situation to where Jimmy was at the beginning of the show. In this, it appears that season two is setting itself up to explore the differences in how a teenager and an adult handle 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” is expanding on the topic of grief to encompass how different generations may 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 grapple 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 coworker Gaby, played by Jessica Williams, continue their will-they-won’t-they relationship in the first few episodes, while Gaby deals with a career change into academia, a desire for something more in her romance, and the stress of moving into a new house. Finally, Jimmy’s coworker Paul, played by Harrison Ford, continues to fight Parkinson’s disease, as he struggles with the reality of aging while still engaging in a budding romance with his doctor, Julie, played by Wendie Malick.

All in all, “Shrinking” is expanding its focus to encompass topics of generational hardships that change with age, in hopes of keeping viewers engaged with an expanded world and storyline. With that being said, the overall atmosphere of the show remains the same — “Shrinking” is about kind gestures and lifting one another up. Season two is a refreshing and humane take on handling dark topics, all the while portraying the complications of relationships in a realistic and humorous manner.