Shrinking: Coin Flip

January 28, 2023 4:44 PM - Season 1, Episode 1

Jimmy, a therapist mourning his wife, takes a more proactive approach with his patients in the hopes that helping them will help himself. AV Club review.

Jimmy is obviously Not Doing Well when he has potential hookers in his pool at 3 a.m.

Jimmy has "compassion fatigue" and snaps at hearing the umpteeth shitty thing his client Grace says her husband says to her, something like the only thing good about her is her tits? He rants about how this isn't the hallmark of a good relationship, her husband is fugly fugly fugly, she should go live with her sister in Vancouver, and if she doesn't break up with the husband, he's breaking up with her as a client.

This goes great, as Grace actually leaves. This inspires Jimmy in how to deal with his ex-military client Sean with whopping PTSD who wants to fight if anyone so much as breathes or looks at him funny. I actually think taking him to MMA sounds like a pretty good idea.

So all is going a bit better, until Jimmy and Sean go to his daughter's soccer game and Grace's husband shows up to beat Jimmy up, and obviously Sean has to join in...

So, is brutal honesty a good tactic to take?....Maybe? The show doesn't seem to pick one side or the other on this one, which is interesting.

posted by jenfullmoon (6 comments total)

This is not bad actually? But I think they're setting up the reasons why therapists are supposed to hew to a code of professional ethics, as the show equally presents his interfering approach to his patients as helping them to a point, but also rebounding in disastrous ways.
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:43 AM on January 29, 2023

I remember a movie scene that featured a therapist. He was conducting a session with a patient, who was presented as being passive and weak. The therapist had sort-of a daydream where he imagined himself giving very pointed advice to the patient. I can't remember the movie, though.
posted by JD Sockinger at 12:23 PM on January 29, 2023

wow, this Bill Lawrence show sure is a Bill Lawrence show (absolutely not a complaint)

I must say I have been enjoying the recent typecasting of Harrison Ford as Annoyed Old Man here and here
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:15 AM on January 30, 2023

I enjoyed the show, but I was confused about the soccer game. (Let's leave aside suspending disbelief that Jimmy would just leave his car on the sidewalk.) Jimmy was at the office; he wasn't even necessarily going to go to the soccer game when he got the call from Sean outside that restaurant where the guy bumped him. They had their chat, decide to go to the soccer game, and futz around trying to climb small mountains. So...

How would Grace's husband know how to find Grace's therapist at any given moment? I mean, I'm not sure we saw anyone else in the office aside from Paul or Gaby, and nobody who works in a therapist's office would tell a patient's husband about the location of a therapist. (I'll admit, the whole time he was striding across the soccer field up until he started yelling, I was also confused because I thought Grace's husband was Jimmy's BFF from whom he was hiding.)

I dunno. It just felt like a glaring error. Grace had been gone for some number of days. Soccer had already started for some number of days. Jimmy and Sean were late, but Grace's husband still arrived JUST after them.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 6:37 PM on January 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Agreed, there's no reasonable way the husband knows where to find Jimmy.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:13 PM on January 30, 2023

yeah, having watched only the first episode, it does feel like a weird plot hole that only happens because the script calls for it to, but also I think I might be okay with it all just kind of happening suddenly, to kind of bring things back down to earth after Jimmy gets reckless and things all go his way. Like… I think I'm probably okay with it in a sort of way where it doesn't make logical sense but it makes emotional sense, kind of.
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:21 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]