Shrinking Season Two and the Grief Comedy Apple Kept

The second season of Shrinking, Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein’s Apple TV+ therapist comedy, ran across twelve episodes from October 2024 into January 2025. The season did one specific thing that contemporary prestige television mostly does not do any more. It deepened the established register of the show without attempting to complicate it.

This sounds like a minor virtue. In the specific context of the current streaming landscape, where second seasons are routinely called upon to either reinvent, darken, or structurally re-engineer their first-season premises, it is a larger virtue than it sounds. Shrinking in its second season is more confidently itself than it was in the first season, and the self it is more confidently is a specific kind of grief comedy that American television has not recently produced in quantity.

What the show is, briefly

Segel plays Jimmy, a therapist whose wife died in the year before the first season begins. He is raising his teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), working at a small therapy practice alongside colleagues Paul (Harrison Ford) and Gaby (Jessica Williams), and negotiating his friendship with neighbour Liz (Christa Miller), his best friend Brian (Michael Urie), and the specific tangled grief his household has been living with. The first season established this emotional geography. The second season uses it.

The season’s central plot premise, which I will describe only at a high level to avoid spoiling the specific pleasures of how it unfolds, involves the arrival of Louis (Brett Goldstein), whose presence immediately restructures the show’s existing grief dynamics. The specific decision to introduce Louis through a particular narrative mechanism, rather than through dramatic confrontation, is the most structurally sophisticated move the show has made across both seasons. The decision pays.

Harrison Ford, continued

Ford’s Paul was, across the first season, the specific discovery of the show. Ford had not done sustained television comedy before Shrinking, and the register required for the role, a specifically patient curmudgeon working through a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis while maintaining a private and professional life that his diagnosis is continuously threatening, is a register he had not previously demonstrated. The first season proved he could do it.

The second season is the demonstration that he can sustain it. The Paul material is given more dedicated runtime in the second season, including a specific multi-episode arc involving his relationship with his adult daughter Meg (Lily Rabe), who has been introduced as a character the show handles with a specific observational care. Rabe, a specific kind of American stage actress, brings the exact register the Paul storyline needs, and the Ford-Rabe scenes across the middle of the season are the show’s most sustained dramatic material.

The Jessica Williams performance

Jessica Williams’s Gaby is the season’s other structural gain. The first season placed Gaby as a reliable presence inside the therapy-office ensemble without giving the character the specific dramatic ownership the show’s other regulars had. The second season corrects this. Gaby is given a specific sustained romantic-arc plotline alongside her ongoing professional and family pressures, and Williams, whose comic register has always been the thing she is best known for, is given substantial dramatic material that she executes at a specifically controlled level.

Williams and Segel together, across the second half of the season, are doing the show’s best two-handed scene work. Their specific dynamic is not romantic (the show has resisted the specific will-they-won’t-they structure that a lesser version of this material would have defaulted to) and instead is operating at the specific register of two adult professionals who are also close friends and who have, across the season, to negotiate the specific complication of one of them entering a new emotional situation.

The Alice arc

Lukita Maxwell’s Alice, the show’s teenage lead, gets the quieter middle-season arc. The first season’s grief centre was Alice as much as Jimmy, and the second season’s task for the character is the specific work of moving her forward without pretending the grief has resolved. Maxwell plays the season at a register that is more internally controlled than the first season required, which is the specifically correct developmental move for a teenage character a year further into loss.

The specific plotline involving Alice’s relationship with Sean (Luke Tennie), Jimmy’s colleague-turned-housemate, is the season’s most careful handling of a potentially dangerous material. Sean, whose own first-season arc established a specific dynamic with the household, is now living in Liz’s converted guest house and working with Alice on a specific entrepreneurial project. The show, understanding the specific emotional stakes, keeps the material clearly friendship-coded and uses it to show Alice rebuilding a non-parental adult relationship at the specific pace a teenager who has lost a parent would require.

The Liz and Derek material

Christa Miller’s Liz and Ted McGinley’s Derek, the neighbour couple whose roles in the first season were primarily supportive, are given more substantive runtime in the second season. The specific arc involving Liz’s adult son and an emerging family-reconfiguration plotline produces the season’s most contained comic set pieces. Miller’s register has been consistent across two seasons, and the show’s comfort with her specific line-delivery register is a reliable source of the show’s humour.

McGinley, who has been a specifically dependable secondary ensemble presence across his long career, is given a specifically quiet dramatic beat in the back half of the season that the show lets him play at a low volume. The scene works because the show has earned the quiet. A lesser show would have made it a bigger moment.

What Brett Goldstein does

I do not want to describe the Louis plotline in detail. What I can say is that Goldstein, who co-created the show and whose public profile was established through Ted Lasso, is playing a specific kind of dramatic register that his established comic persona has not previously explored. The performance is the show’s most structurally delicate element, and the specific care with which the show introduces, complicates, and resolves the Louis material is the show’s most mature writerly achievement.

The specific question of how long-running ensemble comedies handle late-arriving structural pivots is a persistent problem in contemporary American television. Shrinking has solved the problem cleanly. The Louis material does not reinvent the show. It adjusts the show’s existing emotional geography in a specific way that the first season had been setting up without telegraphing.

The twelve-episode decision

One specific structural note. Shrinking has stayed at the slightly-longer season length that the streaming economy has mostly moved away from. Twelve episodes, at roughly thirty-two minutes each, is more runtime than many contemporary streaming shows are getting, and the show uses it. The specific advantage of the slightly-longer season is that the show can run secondary plotlines at a patient pace without collapsing them into the A-plot. The Paul-Meg material, the Gaby romantic arc, the Alice-Sean friendship, the Brian-and-Charlie adoption sub-plot, all of these are given the specific patient runtime they require.

Many contemporary limited series would have compressed this material into eight episodes and produced a thinner result. Shrinking is betting that the audience will reward patience, and Apple’s specific renewal for a third season suggests the bet is paying off.

What the season leaves

Shrinking is, at this point, a show with a stable and observed emotional grammar. The second season is the specific confirmation that the first season was not an accident. The writerly instinct, which belongs primarily to Lawrence, Segel, and Goldstein but which credits across the twelve-episode writers’ room (Neil Goldman, Bradley Whitford the actor also contributing, Annie Mebane, among others), is to trust the specific texture of the established ensemble and to deepen rather than complicate.

This is the specific instinct that American television has historically rewarded across the long runs of its best ensemble comedies (Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, Ted Lasso in its stronger stretches). Shrinking is, I think, writing itself into that tradition. The second season is the evidence. The third, announced in January 2025 for production later this year, will be the specific test of whether the show can sustain the register at length.

Watch the second season across the three-week window Apple released it in, at the specific rhythm of one or two episodes at a sitting. The show is designed for that pace. It rewards the pace. The grief that gave the show its premise has not resolved. It has settled into the specific chronic condition that grief, after the first year, becomes. The show is paying specific attention to the settling, and the attention is the show’s continuing argument for itself.