An Unexpected Delight from the AppleTV+ Show Shrinking: Men
Emotional Awareness Should be Normalized
Foster’s Note: This essay is my entry into the ACX Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025.
The ACX Review of Anything But Books is an interesting challenge, as it could be an infinity of topics—literally anything! When I dialogued with some artificial intelligences about this quandary, I realized that the common denominator is that a review encapsulates an experience. You experience media, you experience a product, you experience a meal. Your review is thus your take on the experience. Being that an experience requires a person to experience the experience, what a review does, in essence, is guide whether something is worth your time.
So with the difficulty of facing an infinity of experiences that you should consider, I’m going with a personalized choice that may apply only to me and perhaps a few of you: you should watch a few episodes of Apple TV+’s Shrinking starring Jason Segel, Jessica Williams, and Harrison Ford. Though many find it to be an entertaining show with the right amount of bittersweet, I find an added bonus: it has many instances of positive depictions of men and their relating to others. The show itself doesn’t center on that as a theme. It’s actually a show about Jimmy (Jason Segel), a Los Angeles therapist who, about a year after the death of his wife Tia in a car accident, takes insight from his work to begin to fix his own life. When we encounter the main protagonist, he’s been throwing himself into his work and personally self-medicating with drugs and sex workers. His relationship with his teenage daughter Alice is strained, with neighbors subbing in for his negligent (and sorrowfully-avoidant) absence.
Jimmy and Sean
At work, Jimmy takes on a new client Sean, a young Afghanistan war veteran who is on court-mandated therapy due to physical incidents stemming from anger issues and very likely post-traumatic stress disorder. And it is coincident with this relationship that Jimmy begins to have insight that his traditional approach to therapy isn’t bettering any of his clients. Jimmy begins to engage with his clients outside of the office in more “field-based” exercises—truth be told he probably oversteps the line of ethical practice, a point his practice-partner-mentor, Paul (Harrison Ford), irritatedly points out to him. But Jimmy will Jimmy, tired of his own bullshit approach and, among other things, takes Sean to mixed martial arts to try to channel his anger such as to find some control levers with which Sean can eventually confront his emotional pain. …and then Jimmy definitely starts to cross the ethical line by housing Sean in his pool house near rent-free. This surprise is a not-quite-surprise for Jimmy’s daughter Alice whom, having happened upon her father with sex workers in her home, finds just another instance of her father probably self-destructing instead of being the dad that she needs.
Jimmy and Paul and Sean
To which we get the first major confluence of positively-reinforcing male relationships: Jimmy, his mentor Paul, and Jimmy’s client Sean. Through the episodes, as Jimmy works with Sean to try to confront the issues that affect him and allow himself to emotionally open up, Paul occasionally guides Jimmy and eventually (by Season 2) convinces Jimmy to let him take over as Sean’s therapist given Jimmy’s dual relationship with Sean interfering with Sean’s ability to make breakthroughs on his own therapeutic goals. All that said, it is both Jimmy and Paul together who confront Sean’s father, Tim, to try to help them manage their father-son relationship, particularly Tim’s reactions to Sean’s mental health (aspects of which touch on perspectives of older men and the black community towards mental health and mental illness). In all of these interactions are men talking to, doing with, and connecting with men in a manner that is forthright yet emotionally open(ish). There’s a lot of calling each other on one’s bullshit, echoing Jimmy’s self realization that entertaining one’s own bullshit helps no one and may actually be harmful. But there’s also a protected space in the men’s interactions of “we’re here together” as well as following up with each other after a “stop the bullshit” confrontation.
Jimmy and Alice (and Paul)
As Jimmy and Paul work to help Sean, the echos of that endeavor circle back towards Jimmy and Paul in their own family relationships. Through Seasons 1 and 2 thus far, you get to see Jimmy address how he’s been a crappy father to Alice, particularly since they both lost Tia…it’s just that he, the adult, was the one to curl up into a ball and check out. You also get to see all the friends and neighbors that have stepped up to mother Alice because they loved Tia. But an interesting dynamic is how Paul contributes to Jimmy and Alice’s reconciliation. Paul takes on Alice as an informal client, demanding candy as payment. He listens to Alice to therapeutically help her emotions, but he also guides Alice back to open up to Jimmy’s re-engagement. For all the criticism Paul lobs at Jimmy at getting too close and involved in his clients, he’s doing the very same thing right into Jimmy’s family. He then guides Jimmy, reminding him of standard professional archetypes that Jimmy’s defying when it comes to his own misunderstandings of Alice’s perspective. Through their repeated professional interactions, Paul helps guide Jimmy when he’s at impasses with Sean or other clients. He provides Jimmy with mentorship, a fatherly figure, and the begrudging support that feels so good to Jimmy because it’s hard won. You fist pump along with Jimmy when Paul irritatedly acknowledges Jimmy’s gumption.
Paul and Jimmy (and Meg and Death and Raymond)
Here’s where we should particularly acknowledge Harrison Ford’s performance as Paul. I remember hearing a podcast once with the grand actor of our generation, Tom Hanks. Something that stuck with me that Hanks mentioned was that as a veteran actor you bring all your previous roles to each current role. That’s not only the actor himself, but that each time the audience encounters Tom Hanks, they remember Tom Hanks as his character in Splash, Big, Philadelphia, Toy Story, Cast Away, etc, etc, and all these performances lie in the mind of the audience with the current character they see Tom Hanks perform right now. With this prior in mind, We find Harrison Ford’s Paul, not as the boyishly charming space-cowboy Han Solo, nor the heroic Indiana Jones, nor even the first installation as the capable Jack Ryan. Instead we find an irritable-yet-clear-eyed prominent therapist whose temper belies his fear of diminished agency as his Parkinson’s Disease advances in symptoms. With his mortality more salient, Paul is in a position to hear Jimmy call Paul out on his own personal bullshit after Paul criticizes Jimmy’s approaches. Much later in the life game than Jimmy, Paul embarks upon his own healing journey with his estranged daughter, Meg, including opening up to the frightful thought of a future where he becomes completely dependent on the care of others. He develops a late love relationship with his neurologist. He reconciles not with his ex-wife whom he cheated on (because she forgave him a long time ago), but in the end reconciles with himself for being a poor husband. He concludes a multi-year therapy with a client named Raymond and then, after lots of goading from Jimmy and others, takes the large vulnerable step of redefining his relationship with Raymond as friends. And throughout each episode, Paul blurs the boundaries of professional and personal in the right way of engaging vulnerability and connection. In the Thanksgiving episode at the end of Season 2, he speaks of his declining road ahead to frame the gift of presence within a community of love and friendship…that surly old man reifies the one whom you hold a special place in your heart because of all of the journey he embodies.
Jimmy and Brian
At the start of the show you are introduced to Brian, Jimmy’s best friend from college. But you also find out that Jimmy’s been avoiding Brian for literally a year since Tia’s death and hadn’t said why. As they go on to reconcile, Jimmy and friends help Brian confront his own commitment issues and finally ask his boyfriend to get married. Oh yeah, it turns out that Brian was in the closet in college but out since then, and it’s a nice depiction to see how Jimmy and Brian relate to each other in a way that’s not ham-handed, not preachy, and not unrealistically awkward. You get a sense of them as best friends but also how now that Brian is out, how their own friendship had to grow to reflect that Brian is who he really is now and not playing a part as before.
Derek and the world
What can I say about Derek? Imagine a solid dude who’s the side character in most interactions as well as occasionally the punchline. He’s Jimmy’s next-door neighbor, a man comfortable pissing off his balcony because the weather and view and life in California is nice. He’s an upbeat older man with a full head of hair. He’s not always aware of the current conversation but easily catches the flow. To wit:
(Derek, cruising up in car towards Jimmy and Sean, his wife Liz, and local Karen named Pam)
He’s the conduit for the introduction of potential beau Derek 2 to Gaby (it’s giving peak wingman). He’s appropriately upset when his son’s girlfriend announces that she’d dodged getting pregnant by his son—mostly upset that his son is an idiot. But he gains depth when his wife, directionless with all of her sons moving off to college, rekindles with a past flame, Mac. She ends up only kissing him, but now Derek, the man that the universe smiles upon, faces the fact that the topical disrespect that his wife displays for him has become real. When Derek goes to confront Mac, the expectation is old-guy fistfight—you feel yourself bracing for the antics. But as Derek enters Mac’s microbrewery and notices the oversized photos that Liz took of shelter dogs, he realizes that while gliding through the start of his retirement, his wife was emotionally drowning and he hadn’t noticed nor listened. Derek then loses his will to fight after tasting one of Mac’s brews—it’s delicious!—but is able to save face by telling Mac to leave the area so that he can finish the beer. Derek thereupon lifts his wife in the immediate sphere with a surprise visit from their three sons and then by having Brian and his husband Charlie request Liz for two-day-a-week childcare help for their new adoptive baby. Derek’s back on top of the world, and now he’s bringing his community with him.
I obviously haven’t covered the (numerous!) outstanding female acting talent of this show, nor have I delved further into the depths of each character and their relationships with each other. That’s not the point. The point is that a big undercurrent of today’s society is the manosphere and the also-rans of men. We have our current President in large part to the reactionary sentiment of men. Joe Rogan, UFC, and Jordan Peterson are some of the largest voices that have sway over what a man is and should be. And here on the side of the current grotesque is this show about therapy and emotions. It’s excellent writing, yes, quite punchy. But it’s good storytelling of comedy and sad sentiment in the right balance to simulate day-to-day life, much more so than violence, life-and-death stakes, and ‘splody things. They are good depictions of men because, if men merely parroted the depictions, they’d still enact more positive-sum relationships than what is reality. Go catch two or three episodes. If you haven’t continued beyond that, no big loss. But if you continue on with the show, take note of the men. They aren’t angels, but they sure as hell aren’t demons.