This week's QuickTrip tackles CONCLAVE, BLITZ, and QUEER

If we're talking about movies, what's SHRINKING doing in here?

I’m going to cheat today.

The point of this format is for me to give you three reviews and get out. It’s better for me because it gives me a shape to think about when I’m putting something together, and it’s better for you because I can publish this more often instead of packing fifteen things into one newsletter that takes me two weeks to write.

But I’m going to cheat and sneak in a fourth thing before the film reviews begin because I can’t stop thinking about this season of Shrinking, which you can find on AppleTV+. Created by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein, it’s a show that very much feels like the sum of those three guys and their previous work. I like the collision of Jason Segel and Bill Lawrence, and it feels inevitable when you look at the tone of Segel’s work as a writer and Lawrence’s various shows as a writer/producer. I see a similar sensibility at work in their work, and I love that this show is the result of putting them together with Ted Lasso breakout Brett Goldstein, all of those comedy brains working together to come up with something consistently funny and often deeply moving.

Season one focused on Jimmy Laird (Segel), a therapist who is in personal free-fall because his wife Lia died in a car accident, leaving him alone with their teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell). He’s a disaster, and he finds himself crossing ethical lines with his patients, directing them to take specific actions in their lives, and in the process, he starts making a concentrated effort to pull himself out of his downward spiral and reconnect with Alice. Much of the first season was spent establishing the community around Jimmy and Alice, including his mentor, Dr. Paul Rhodes (Harrison Ford), their next-door neighbors Liz (Christa Miller) and Derek (Ted McGinley) who basically have been raising Alice since her mother’s death, another therapist named Gaby (Jessica Williams) who was Lia’s best friend, and Brian (Michael Urie), Jimmy’s best friend who he hasn’t spoken to in a year because he was too busy destroying his life.

Season two is better in every way. The now-established relationships are deeper. The characters are allowed room to grow, and not just the “main” characters, either. This is an ensemble in every way, and this season has made it clear that the point of the show is to show how much we depend on the people around us and how important it is to care for those connections. The show explores the way we constantly enact our own trauma on the world around us and how hard it can be to ask for the help we need. It is a show that has a huge, empathetic heart, but it also has a wicked tongue. It is brutally funny, and often about things you would not expect shows to joke about. Shrinking has done such a good job of establishing these characters that they are allowed to show all of their rough edges without it feeling like the show is judging them. Everyone has their bruises. Everyone is carrying something around that they need to address. And community is one of the best ways to heal those bruises and ease those burdens. Ford’s character is grappling with the advancement of his Parkinson’s disease, something he kept secret from his co-workers at first, and I think he’s so good here that we can retroactively erase Regarding Henry from his filmography. There is a vulnerability to Ford these days that is a brand-new tool for him as an actor, and Shrinking uses that to striking effect. I am equally impressed by how much new depth we’ve gotten from Ted McGinley this season, and I think it’s safe to call this his career-best work as well. Letting us see the human side of Derek only makes him funnier the rest of the time, and it’s given Crista Miller so much more to play off of this season. Bill Lawrence told me that Derek and Liz are very much based on his own relationship with Miller, his wife, and I think they did a great job of making that marriage much more realistic and interesting this season. Jessica Williams was always good on The Daily Show, but this is the kind of showcase actors dream about. She gets to be funny, serious, sexy, and emotional, and she doesn’t even have to carry the show. She just gets to show up, kill it every time, and take off. Urie’s work continues to get funnier the more the show runners throw at him, and the show has taken full advantage of him this year.

One of the great surprises this season is the way they used Brett Goldstein, who wasn’t even going to play an on-camera role in the show originally. They knew they were going to eventually bring in Louis, the character who was driving the other car in the accident that killed Jimmy’s wife, but they didn’t cast the part for the longest time. Finally, at the last minute, it was Segel who suggested Goldstein. This couldn’t be more different from his role as Roy Kent in Ted Lasso, but I suspect Louis is closer to the “real” Goldstein in many ways. Part of what makes Shrinking so smart is the way it refuses to write any of its characters as any kind of easy binary. Jimmy’s patients like Sean (Luke Tennie) or Grace (Heidi Gardner) are not just problems to solve, and even after Jimmy makes progress with them, that progress is never linear. His relationship with Alice is particularly fraught because of the enormous guilt he carries as a parent who feels like he failed his child. That absolutely destroys me, and Segel is so good at showing us the uglier parts of Jimmy while still somehow remaining human and sympathetic. Bill Lawrence has been a guiding hand on some great shows, and blending humor and heart is a big part of his signature. I would argue that everything he’s ever done comes down to the final shot in the final scene of the final episode this year, which is called “The Final Thanksgiving.” It is a perfect image, and it feels like it’s the exact note the show needed to end on. It says everything about the entire time we’ve invested into Jimmy so far, and it leaves us in a fascinating place for the future.

If you haven’t been watching this one, they’re about to drop their last few episodes of the season. I’ve watched them all thanks to the Apple press screener site, and I think it’s one of the best things Apple has released so far. I’ve ranted and raved about it on social media, but I want to urge you to catch up with this show as soon as you can. It is a terrific accomplishment for all involved, and I can’t wait for the next season.