Shrinking Big. Brett Goldstein, Bigger.
Brett Goldstein is on a roll. With Ted Lasso back for Season 3 and the recently-wrapped Apple TV Shrinking entering its “maybe I need to binge that show?” space in the stream, the guy who plays one of the best TV characters in recent memory, Futbol legend-turned-Diamond Dog Roy Kent, has arrived.
For those who have not heard of Goldstein, Ted Lasso, or Roy Kent, first: watch Lasso. All of it. Season three is happening now, episodes are released on Wednesdays.
If you don’t have time right now and you want to read the rest of this article, here is a helpful flash back to Lasso Season 2, where Goldstein as the crusty Roy joins the Dogs, Coach Ted Lasso’s informal men’s support group, showing a crack in the emotional wall.
Goldstein, a Brit who began his career doing stand-up comedy (actually, he still is doing stand-up, he just appeared in Seattle earlier this month at a 2000 seat show) before writing, acting, and podcasting for a decade, caught his big break in 2020 when he was hired to write Lasso with Jason Sudeikis. This morphed into his pitch to producer Bill Lawrence to play Roy Kent. He’s won two Emmys doing that since.
According to a Rolling Stone interview, Goldstein’s dad once told him after reading an impressive story he had written as a school assignment that “writing is an actual job.” (Nobody had better tell John King this). Thus began Goldstein’s journey, which now has landed him back with Lawrence (and now Jason Segel) giving the world the slightly edgier, self-helpy dramedy, Shrinking.
Like Roy during his days roaming the pitch in the Premier League, Goldstein is here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.
The 10-episode series was released January 27, 2023, and just wrapped up a few weeks ago. The show centers on the lives of three psychologists who practice together in a small office, with Segel as Jimmy, Jessica Williams as Gaby, and Harrison Ford as Paul.
Shrinking is a show about grief, mental health, relationships, and human frailty. Kind of like Lasso without soccer, and with a larger dash of irreverent cynicism.
Fair warning, it’s probably not for your middle-schooler. The series begins with Jimmy air-playing Billy Joel’s “Angry Young Man” poolside sitting at a table set with grief-altering goodies, as his scantily-clad hired “friends” frolic in the water (Liz, Jimmy’s neighbor, asks—“Jimmy, are you paying them?”).
I agree Jimmy. Billy Joel is really great.
The raunch factor as the show moves on is not quite a habanero pepper, but it’s certainly a Scotch Bonnet at times. Jimmy’s colleague Gaby especially is, to put it mildly, frank and forthright about topics concerning “human sexuality” and all the nuts and bolts related thereto. Pun intended. As she and Liz later become besties the gal-pal banter around this gets a little shock-my-mouth.
But there also are plenty of very real “I’m sorry”, “I support you”, “I feel your pain”, and “you-need-to-draw-a boundary” moments in Shrinking. This show is about therapists, after all.
When the poolside piano-and-panty scene opens, Jimmy has lost his wife in a car accident a year earlier and really, really can’t right the ship. His neighbor Liz, who is way enmeshed with Jimmy’s daughter Alice, playing surrogate mother while Jimmy flounders, asks him over the back fence: “Is this you, forever?”
Jimmy starts to get traction by doing something that clearly could put his license in jeopardy. He allows himself to get personally involved in his client’s lives in hopes of creating breakthroughs. For them, and maybe for him.
So the series launches from there, and hijinks ensue. Jimmy threatens to fire Grace (SNL’s Heidi Gardner) as a client if she doesn’t dump her abusive husband—which leads to another client Sean (Luke Tennie) a military vet with PTSD, being forced to defend Jimmy from said husband by beating him senseless. . . at a horrified Alice’s high school soccer game. As if losing her mother wasn’t enough.
Sean later moves into Jimmy’s pool house, and there is an Alice-and-Sean dynamic, and an Alice-and-Gaby dynamic, and a Liz-and-everyone dynamic (to Liz’ credit, she collects and polishes rocks as a meditation measure in her search for serenity around her control issues).
But the emotional core of the show exists in the relationship between Jimmy and Alice, whom he has failed as a father in the wake of her mother’s death. And he knows it. How these two navigate the tragedy and grief, and the movement toward each other in the wake of their relationship roles essentially being reversed, is good stuff. There is revelation, recovery and reconciliation amid all of the irreverence in Shrinking.
In casting Paul, the psychologist-owner of the clinic where Jimmy and Gaby work, Goldstein’s ask-for-the-moon choice was Ford. But what are the chances? Well, reportedly after reaching out, the next thing he knew, he was at Ford’s house for dinner talking about how the show was going to play out. Ford apparently took the role without seeing a script.
Ford plays Paul as a no-nonsense counselor, sufferer of no fools, and tertiarily, a lover of candy. Fun Dip, which Alice gives him (yes, there is an important Alice/Paul dynamic as well), remember Fun Dip?
Later, in a hilarious party sequence, he expands his candy horizons with some 100 mg infused gummies, courtesy of Liz. The Liz-and-Paul dynamic:
The dysfunctional mentor/mentee relationship between Paul and Jimmy, especially when Paul discovers that Jimmy is crossing ethical boundaries with clients, also provides for some great scenes.
So Harrison Ford….yeah, yeah. We all love Harrison Ford.
Greedo, I’ll get you your money. Nine out ten media blurbs you will hear about Shrinking include some version of “Harrison Ford is so wonderful in that show!” Generational talent, icon, and all that, and here he’s doing something way outside the box. He’s a hoot (even while playing a character with Parkinson’s) and he’s probably having a great time with the role, which gives him room to be salty, sarcastic, and sympathetic all at once. He’ll likely win an Emmy.
But the real Shrinking story is Goldstein. Who, interestingly, loves the Muppets and Sesame Street (he’s been a guest on the latter). Although I suppose after watching his scenes in Lasso which involve Roy’s niece this isn’t that surprising. The gruff and profane Roy Kent—whom Goldstein characterizes as his alter ego—clearly has a heart for small children.
Goldstein even has become sort of a (reluctant) sex symbol of sorts. He recently played a buffed-up Hercules in a Marvel movie bonus scene.
But his success with Lasso, and now Shrinking, tells a better story. One about an English kid who loved to write, act, and make people laugh, worked his tail off in semi-obscurity for years, and now has his moment. Bringing the world a few characters and storylines that make us think about some real-life, difficult, messy things, and the hope of living well despite them--with a healthy spoonful of laughter. Because as Paul says in Shrinking: “Nobody gets through this life unscathed.”
Shrinking, like Ted Lasso, streams on Apple TV. Season 1 is complete and available for binge, Season 2 is slated for early 2024.
