Review: Shrinking, “And That’s Our Time” | Season 3, Episode 11

Hey free subscribers—as always, in case you've been following along with Shrinking's third season and want to join the conversation after the finale, a preview of Erik's review. Become a paid subscriber to keep reading and have your say.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that Jimmy Laird didn’t expect to wind up here. Sitting across the table from the woman he recently chased away, on a breakfast date arranged by the mentor and surrogate father figure who was similarly, more recently shoved out of his orbit. None of this was in the short-range plans of Shrinking’s main character, and it definitely wasn’t in any long-range visions he would’ve laid out before we met him. The final note of the show’s third season is sweet and ideal, but it’s not an ideal that would’ve occurred to Jimmy–a man who can’t help but idealize things—on his own. He needs a close friend to push him into it.

This is not how I imagined this season of TV would end, either. As the credits rolled on “The Bodyguard of Sadness,” I pictured Jimmy on a backslide, indulging in old, bad habits as the people he’d come to rely on for support all moved on with their lives and left him alone. That would’ve been a bold, challenging reset to Shrinking’s status quo, but it probably wouldn’t have been the right move for the show. Just another example of why TV review prognosticating is as ill-advised as TV creators posting online about the “completely new story” their well-liked hangout show will tackle next season. [Editor's note: the postmortems are out and he just meant "time jump," not alt-universe. Boring!]

Instead, Bill Lawrence and company give their original three-season arc a send-off that’s both fulfilling and familiar, a pleasant capper to this phase of its characters’ lives. Alice is off to college, Paul’s retired to Connecticut, Gabby and Derrick #2 are engaged, Sean’s out of the poolhouse, and so on. It’s perhaps implausibly soon for Jimmy to be on an upswing after coming so close to bottoming out—though he does face some challenges to get there. Not that it’s anything more daunting than setting reasonable expectations for Alice’s last few days in Pasadena or picking up the phone to mend fences with Paul, but come on: This is Shrinking we’re talking about here. Even with their various neuroses and anxieties, these people live comfortably enough that two of them could drop everything and plan a leisurely trip to Barcelona. (Read the name of that city the way Ted McGinley pronounces it.)