Review: Shrinking, “Hold Your Horsies” | Season 3, Episode 5

Shrinking has an edge on other TV comedies. Because it’s a show built around a therapist’s office, characters saying exactly what’s on their mind comes across completely naturally, and characters holding something in doesn’t always feel like a plot contrivance. Hence an episode like “Hold Your Horsies,” which propels itself on the fuel of Gaby and Sean talking through personal issues and relationship problems, and also stages a close-quarters scene that answers the pressing season-three question of “What’s eating Jimmy Laird?”

Shrinking has a disadvantage compared to other TV comedies. Because it’s a show built around a therapist’s office, characters saying exactly what’s on their mind comes across as a gleaming neon sign broadcasting the themes of any given episode. And so in “Hold Your Horsies,” we hear over and over again in dialogue that Sean, Gaby, Jimmy, Alice, and Paul are being nudged from their comfort zones.

Neither of these things is entirely good or entirely bad. As one of Paul, Jimmy, or Gaby’s real-world counterparts might remind us, it can be both at the same time. “Hold Your Horsies” can be one of season three’s funniest episodes yet, and it can get all those laughs while stating its characters’ dilemmas a little too plainly. And as one of those miniature crises unspools, it can get tangled with the reveal of Paul’s impending cross-country move to form a knot that Jimmy’s going to have a heck of a time untying. That said, I can’t say I love this news landing alongside Shrinking’s most questionable romantic tension since that time Alice tried to kiss Sean—an incident that, coincidentally, gets a shout-out during “Hold Your Horsies.”