‘Shrinking’ Season 3 Review: Harrison Ford Brings Weight to a Gentle, Familiar World (Apple TV)

Laugh tracks—whether canned or generated by a live studio audience—were never really the core of what we used to call a sitcom. They were certainly one of its most visible traits, along with the classic three-camera setup used to record scenes in front of an audience, but the true logic of the “situational comedy” had more to do with its closed-off world: repeated interiors, little to no connection with the outside world, and a group of characters who, with minor variations and the occasional guest star, returned episode after episode. On the surface, Shrinking does not share the formal characteristics of a sitcom as it was understood through the 1990s. Almost everything else, however, points straight back to that format.

There is another reference point the Jason Segel –and Harrison Ford– led series evokes just as strongly: early-2000s indie cinema. Not its more radical or arthouse side, but the polished, Sundance-friendly version of it. The carefully curated “sensitive” pop songs come straight from that era and are performed by artists associated with it (Benjamin Gibbard, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver) and several of the episode directors made exactly that kind of film in the past (Zach Braff, James Ponsoldt, Jamie Babbit). Most of all, it shows in the tone, which constantly oscillates between gentle humor and emotional uplift. Everything about Shrinking recalls films like Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go, or Thumbsucker, among many others—only filtered through the ultra-processed logic of television, where no conflict is ever fully resolved and narrative development is stretched to its breaking point.

That is where the sitcom side of Shrinking ultimately takes over. The eleven-episode seasons (as with this third one; the second had twelve) push this kind of indie-dramedy sensibility to an extreme, making it feel monotonous and, at times, exhausting. What might work reasonably well in a two-hour movie becomes an endless repetition of situations—many of them quite minor—that start to feel interchangeable. Some of these conflicts initially seem weighty or urgent, but with one notable exception, they steadily lose narrative and emotional substance as the episodes pile up.

Over time, the series has shifted its focus. It is no longer primarily about Jimmy Laird (Segel), the tortured psychologist trying to climb out of the depressive hole left by his wife’s death through a risky, boundary-breaking therapeutic approach. Instead, the show now follows a dozen characters who appear to inhabit the same physical space—everyone’s houses and the therapy office look like slightly different angles of the same set, where the characters constantly bump into one another—while offering each other good or terrible advice about how to deal with their personal problems.

At the end of Season 2 (spoilers ahead), Jimmy seemed to have resolved both his conflict with the man responsible for his wife’s death (Brett Goldstein, also a co-creator of the series) and his strained relationship with his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell). Season 3 therefore pushes him toward the prospect of reentering the dating world, a threshold he finds extremely difficult to cross. At the same time, Alice is considering leaving for college, introducing yet another family conflict the two of them must navigate.

Dr. Gaby (Jessica Williams) has her own romantic troubles, which—at least in the first half of the season—take a back seat as she develops an unusual relationship with one of her patients (Sherry Cola). A significant portion of the narrative energy instead goes into following the neighbor Liz (Christa Miller), as she deals with the return home of one of her three rather useless sons while also managing everything surrounding the impending arrival of a baby that lawyer Brian (Michael Urie) is set to adopt with his husband Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), assuming things go smoothly with the biological mother.

The most significant—and in my view, the only genuinely compelling—subplot in Shrinking revolves around Dr. Paul Rhoades’s worsening Parkinson’s disease. As the condition becomes more visible and disruptive, it creates new complications and forces the famously prickly, bad-tempered therapist (Harrison Ford) to confront what the illness entails. Treated with humor and supported by special guest appearances (it is no spoiler to mention that Michael J. Fox has a funny and moving cameo), this storyline is the only one that truly sustains the show’s “sensitive” ambitions alongside its attempts at comedy.

This points to another of Shrinking’s core problems. Its comic beats are rarely very funny, and on a personal level, they almost never make me laugh. The humor is basic and, in many ways, just as old-fashioned as the sitcoms and movies the series clearly draws from. At times, it feels as though the sensibility of veteran creator Bill Lawrence—whose career includes Spin City in the late ’90s—never quite moved past the ’80s and ’90s, and that the show is forcing that outdated humor onto its therapeutic, emotionally attuned subject matter. It works occasionally—such as when Ford delivers a genuinely amusing reference to one of his iconic roles—but for the most part it feels at odds with a barrage of therapeutic clichés that would likely make any psychologist cringe.

A strong cast, combined with the basic kindness and warmth of most of the characters, makes Shrinking watchable—and tolerable—for longer than it probably should be (Note: the season premiere runs for over an hour). Still, it rarely delivers real satisfaction, either comedically or emotionally. Much like those 2000s indie films it resembles, it often gives the impression of saying something deep and meaningful, when in reality its conclusions rarely go much further than what one might find in a self-help book picked up at the supermarket.