Review: Shrinking, “My Bad” | Season 3, Episode 1

Welcome back to our slightly delayed start to coverage of the third season of Shrinking. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. $5 a month gets you access to these reviews and everything else we're covering.

I hate to start my first day on the job by getting super meta, but it was funny to open the Episodic Medium Discord recently to see both Myles’ and Donna’s pre-release assessment that season three of Shrinking is “still Shrinking.” At the risk of damning with faint praise, I have to concur: In the two-part-but-we’re-presenting-it-as-an hour-long premiere, “My Bad,” Shrinking is still Shrinking. And if Shrinking is still Shrinking as it enters its third season, then it’s doing its job.

This isn’t, nor has it ever been, groundbreaking television. There’s a reason that Bill Lawrence is currently flourishing in the streaming world*, and it’s because he’s as good as anyone at capturing the charms of traditional TV within the looser standards and shorter seasons of streaming. Does that mean that Shrinking sometimes resembles nothing more than “Cougar Town, but they can say ‘fuck,’ and they do it a lot”? Certainly. Does that feel especially true in “My Bad,” an episode in which everyone is way too involved with each other’s shit, Christa Miller engages in some wine humor, and one of Liz and Derek’s large adult sons ignores property lines in ways that would make the Cul-de-Sac crew proud? Absolutely.

(*It’s been a good week for shows produced by Lawrence, with Shinking returning and Apple announcing a fourth season within 24 hours of Ted Lasso’s “coming summer 2026” announcement.)

But this is also the third season premiere, and if you’re still here, it means you too have something invested in these people’s shit: Concerned about Paul’s worsening Parkinson’s symptoms, wrapped up in the latest stage of Jimmy’s grief, or rubbing our hands together in anticipation of a great Derek bon mot whenever Ted McGinley pops that immaculate head of hair of his into the frame. The spirit of Jimmying has taken hold of every character on Shrinking, and it has its claws in us, too. If I were to wager a guess, some us might’ve been excited by the name of the premiere riffing off of Scrubs’ titling convention. And let’s be honest: It is kind of fun that Paul and Julie become husband and wife in an episode that shares a title with the Scrubs episode where Jordan appears for the first time.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of this! If I’m sounding defensive, or projecting an insecurity, it could be that I’m coming at these reviews from a “it’s just Shrinking, not every one of these needs to be an exegesis on TV comedy” angle. In that spirit, I’d like to talk about how “My Bad” is remarkably light on its feet for an hour-long episode—how the runtime on the screener initially had me sweating, but by the time Paul was hallucinating a wedding-cake-eating Gerry (Michael J. Fox), I couldn’t tell where the last 60-plus minutes went. I want to let you know how I cackled at all the extra physical business Jason Segel does this week, or Gaby’s swift descent into full-blown wedding planner mode (who’s on the other end of that walkie?), and Michael Urie’s read on “She said that she liked my look and you know I’ve always been on the fence about this jacket!”

But I am who I am and I came up in the school of TV criticism I came up in, so I wound up with a notes doc of full of observations about the exponential growth of the Shrinking cast, the impact that must have on how the show’s being written, and the acknowledgment of it in “My Bad”—whether it’s the main cast’s ability to fill out an entire section of bleachers, the fact there’s enough of them to convincingly pull off a such a nice looking wedding on the fly, or how the uniqueness and the size of the Cognitive Therapy Center gang becomes text during Alice’s interview with the Wesleyan soccer coach. “You’re lucky to have such a big and frighteningly loyal support group” she says, a choice of words that can’t not be rooted in Shrinking’s workplace setting, right?

There are places where you can feel the size of that support group contributing to the length of the premiere. After the cold open introduction to Gerry and Dr. Rhoades’ Wild Ride at the Porsche track, there’s a run of catch-up with the rest of the characters. It makes sense, since it’s been two Christmases since we last saw these people, and there is a little style to the montage. But it can also feel perfunctory and like padding the episode.

These sections also smack of loose ends from season two either being tidied up or tied up. Jimmy must still be seeing Louis with some regularity, and they meet on a park bench to discuss career prospects before it’s ta-ta for now/“See you in a few months as Roy Kent!” (And I know we should always take what Jimmy tells his patients with a grain of salt, but is “fake it ’til you make it” really good advice for people who ought to be facing their emotions head on?) Later, Dr. Sykes kicks Sean to the curb, which feels like the writers putting their own “I don’t see this going anywhere” conversation in the character’s mouths. It’s less the end of a plotline than fuel for Sean’s long-simmering motivation to move on by moving out of the pool house and/or setup for Paul’s introduction to The Field, “an intelligent energy force who knows who you’re supposed to be.” Paul’s a renowned therapist, but I think Sean’s right to be skeptical of the concept: Sounds like hokey religions and ancient weapons to me, kid.

The Field snares Paul in some meaningful “physician heal thyself” traps. It’s hard to imagine a universe far-fetched enough that a Harrison Ford character would be psyched about a second wedding, let alone one held beneath Christmas lights in his employee’s neighbor’s yard. But he winds up hurting Julie by not fully buying into the wedding until it’s almost too late. As he enters his “Fuck Parkinson’s” Era and reverses the supporter/suppportred dynamic with Jimmy, Paul might be misinterpreting the signals he’s getting from The Field. The person he’s supposed to be right now is the one who shows up for Julie and who lets his friends go way overboard in order to celebrate their love.

That is, to borrow a phrase, his bad. The recurring “my bad”s of “My Bad” are a symptom of the lack of boundaries between these characters; the ways they make up for it are a nice nod toward Shrinking’s themes of second chances. We see that manifested in ways big and small in the premiere — in Paul and Julie’s marriage-of-convenience-but-also-because-they-really-love-each-other, but also Alice calling the Wesleyan soccer coach back following some encouragement to leave the nest (and permission to play the “dead mom” card one last time), or Derrick #2 finally nailing his “I love you” to Gaby after a few hilarious misfires. A trickier and more volatile version of this is Brian going back on his firm “Ava won’t be involved with the baby” stance, because it’s a second chance granted a) without Ava really knowing it’s a second chance, and b) out of cowardice. I can’t see this spectacularly blowing up in his and Charlie’s faces at all!

Until it does, the storyline feeds into this feeling of the expanded Shrinking family, and deciding who belongs in it and who doesn’t. A half-hour comedy is not a snowball that can keep rolling down a hill, picking up more and more picking up more and more cast members. Typically, in the TV world where Bill Lawrence cut his teeth, you lose people before you add new ones. Shrinking may have found a loophole through that law of sitcom physics by starting with Ted “Patron Saint of Jumping the Shark” McGinley rather than adding him midstream, so I’m curious to see how this decreasing amount of elbow room plays out on top of and beneath the surface of season three. 

But there I go, hovering my finger over the “exegesis” button when I promised I wouldn’t. It’s only Shrinking. It’s still Shrinking. And in this twofer of a premiere, that’s fine by me. 

Stray observations

• Hey there! It’s me, Erik Adams — apologies for the delayed review. (Blame whoever at Apple scheduled this premiere for my final day of in-house blogging for the Sundance Film Festival.) Myles swears he’s not assigning me exclusively to his hand-me-downs, and I’m willing to take him at his word. I’m also eager to jump into Shrinking because of its cast and its pedigree, and because I haven’t really had a chance to write about the show up to this point. I can’t guarantee this is the last time I play the “dead dad” card, but: Season one dropped at a difficult time in my life, when I was leaving a job that wasn’t the right fit and I was watching my father—who learned he had Parkinson’s disease a little over a year before he found out about the metastatic prostate cancer that was ravaging his body—begin a steep three-month decline. For a while, I didn’t think I was ready to see Indiana Jones go through moments of all-too-familiar freezing-up and trembling in the middle of a show that was also about grieving a loved one. But here we are, nearly three years and a lot of processing and talk therapy later (the latter of which I’ll also strive to not bring up too often), and I’m looking forward to once again doing weekly coverage of an enjoyable hangout show that’s keeping Damon Wayans Jr. around for its third season.
• That said: Michael J. Fox’s scenes in “My Bad” hit me like a ton of bricks. The guy still has a way with a “This is heavy”-type aside to himself: “What the fuck? I was here first” is a good cold-open button.
• I can suspend my disbelief for a lot of things in a TV show, but a character struggling to reciprocate an “I love you” always bumps for me. So I appreciate the spin that “My Bad” puts on that old chestnut, hinging the Gaby-Derrick #2 storyline not on Derrick #2’s inability to say “I love you,” but rather his inability to say it like a normal person.
• The mustard that Jessica Williams puts on the “love” and “white” in “As much as I love doing The Electric Slide with white people, do you really think this is about me?”: That’s acting.
• Your Derekism of the week: “I love a pocket square. It’s like your suit is winking at people.” (And if it were 10 years ago, I would say “Hey man, you don’t have to tell me twice.”)
• I hope this made it to the Apple TV cut, but in the screener, the string players at the wedding do the Harrison Ford-Jessica Williams classic “Every Morning.”