Shrinking and Dear Edward: Two Starry New AppleTV+ Shows Miss the Mark

By Liam Lacey

The three-year-old AppleTV+ streaming service has had some admirable successes, notably the Academy Award–winning film CODA, and the sports comedy Ted Lasso (2020-2021), which earned a record 20 Emmy nominations for its debut season and was celebrated as a timely flicker of optimism during the darkest days of COVD-19.

A scene from Shrinking.

Now, two of the writers from that series, Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, have teamed up with Jason Segel to create a new half-hour series, Shrinking (Rating: C+). The first two of its 10 episodes dropped last Friday. In it, Segel stars as Jimmy, a therapist who goes into a descending emotional tailspin a year after the death of his wife, Lila (Lilan Bowden).

In the opening episode, Jimmy is boozing, popping pills, and playing loud music at 3 am. A couple of young escorts frolic in his pool when he wakes his neighbour, Liz (Christa Miller). Liz is not just worried about the noise; she has become virtual guardian to Jimmy’s neglected teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell).

In the series, Jimmy also has a kind of workplace family of fellow therapists. That’s where we find the best part of Shrinking, which is the performance by Harrison Ford, the clinic’s senior partner, Paul.

As you might expect from Harrison Ford, Paul is a curmudgeon, but his character also comes across as intelligent, insightful, and dryly funny and, when the later scenes demand it, refreshingly loose and open. Rounding out the workplace team is the brash gal pal, Gabby, who is warmly played by Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams.

While Jimmy’s trials are at the forefront, each of the other partners have their troubles. Paul has a private reason why he needs to establish contact with his semi-estranged daughter, and Gabby’s marriage is headed toward an emotional dead end.

But the manic, despondent Jimmy is taking up everyone’s attention with his ongoing, very public meltdown, and both the script and Segel’s shambling eager-to-please performance asks for more indulgence than we may be willing to give.

As part of Jimmy’s desire to change his life, he starts using unorthodox methods to push his patients out of their ruts. He spies on another patient on dates and insists an emotionally abused wife (SNL’s Heidi Gardner) leave her husband, despite her conflicted loyalties. When Gabby refers Sean (Luke Tennie), a war vet with PTSD to his care, Jimmy decides to take him to a martial arts gym to vent his anger, then moves Sean into his home, along with 17-year-old Alice.

Throughout, Shrinking plays like a cringe sitcom in which the jokes feel too glib for the weighty content. There is a lot of grief and a lot of inappropriate behaviour going on here and there are certainly some laughs as well, but too often, they leave you feeling queasy.

A scene from Dear Edward

Now we’re in the dark middle of winter, for some reason, the executives at Apple TV+ thought it would be a perfect time to introduce another series about grief therapy, this time without the laughs.

The 10-part hour-long series is called Dear Edward (Rating: C+), which was adapted by Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) from Ann Napolitano’s 2020 bestselling tearjerker about a 12-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a jet crash that killed 191 people including his family. The first three episodes are released this Friday.

Edward (Colin O’Brien) starts as an intellectually gifted, socially awkward adolescent who is moving with his parents (Brian d’Arcy James and Robin Tunney) and older brother (Maxwell Jenkins) from New York to Los Angeles. When he’s the sole survivor of a plane crash, he is adopted by his aunt and uncle (Taylor Schilling and Carter Hudson) and becomes a kind of celebrity.

The show’s title, explained in later episodes, comes from the fact that Edward’s aunt receives hundreds of letters addressed to her nephew from strangers, which she hides from him, fearful that he will be overwhelmed. Aunt Lacey is both grieving for her sister and dealing with sudden motherhood, after she has been unable to conceive a child of her own.

When the airline agrees to provide three months of group therapy for those affected by the crash, the plot spreads out. The grief group includes Adriana (Anna Uzele), the African American granddaughter of a famous Harlem congresswoman. There’s Linda, four months pregnant with her late boyfriend’s child. Kojo (Idris DeBrand) comes from Ghana to care for his young niece (Khloe Bruno).

In the only performance bordering on comic, Connie Britton plays Dee Dee, a wealthy New York house woman who discovers her late husband was living a double life. Throughout, there are lots of parallels and echoes — dismayed partners, survivor’s guilt, sibling rivalries, journeys of self-discovery — but with too many subplots to follow, connected in knots of grief. Characters appear and then disappear from the screen for prolonged periods, and often barely move ahead in the interval.

The most forward moving of these stories involves Edward’s gradual emergence from psychological trauma through his friendship with a tomboyish neighbour girl Shay (Eva Ariel Binder), who becomes a kind of substitute for his lost brother and a budding romantic interest. Typical of the script’s heavy-handed approach, her dialogue handily incorporates her character description: “I’m the unexpectedly athletic, smart nerdy girl with an edge? Been that way since third grade.”

To its credit, Dear Edward reflects Katims’ talent with casting and garnering strong performances. But there is something amiss. The show also suffers from a lack of an organizing idea to explain this claustrophobic descent in shared misery, and the relentless sad song soundtrack begins to feel aggressively manipulative.

The theory, presumably, is that misery shared is lessened. But personally, I’m more inclined to seek out some escape from the mid-winter doldrums.

Shrinking. Written by Bill Lawrence, Brett Goldstein, Jason Segel. Starring Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Williams. Now available on Apple TV+.

Dear Edward. Adapted by Jason Katims from the novel by Ann Napolitano. Starring Colin O’Brien, Connie Britton, and Taylor Schilling. Now available on Apple TV+.