Shrinking is a drama comedy that follows a bereaved therapist who decides one day that he’s going to tell his patients exactly what he thinks of them. At a glance it is the American response to Afterlife by Ricky Gervais. Our protagonist Jimmy is struggling to come to terms with the sudden loss of his wife and has been mentally checked out from his life and responsibilities. The show begins with him acknowledging his mental absence and vowing to make a change. He wants to help his patients properly and reconnect with the teenage daughter whose emotional needs he has neglected. The first step on this journey is the revelation in his therapy. Jimmy decides to bend the ethics of his position and insert himself into the lives of his patients, straight up telling one to leave her husband and taking another to an MMA class to relieve anger problems.
The concept reminds me of Yes Man with Jim Carrey, a 2008 film about a man who vows to say ‘yes’ to everything. It’s a similar set up: the introduction of a revolutionary life code and the exploration of its ramifications. But Shrinking doesn’t deliver on this, and Jimmy’s new style of therapy isn’t explored to the extent it could have been. Sean, for example, is introduced as a new patient of Jimmy’s who is dealing with PTSD from his time in the forces. It causes him to lash out violently in even minor confrontations. One such incident means that Sean is asked to leave his parent’s house and finds himself with nowhere to live. He is forced to move in with unlikely new friend Jimmy, his therapist. From this point, Sean’s PTSD is forgotten about and the original basis of the relationship between Jimmy and Sean becomes largely irrelevant. Shrinking abandons the set up and becomes a tradition sitcom. A cast of related characters, family, friends, nosy neighbours, interact in ways both comical and heart-warming.
Shrinking is a cosy, feel good type of watch. There are some genuinely funny moments. I particularly liked the story ark that followed Harrison Ford’s character, who learns to break down his tough, traditionally masculine front and open up to his family and friends, strengthening his relationships with them. It was a clever casting decision to have the man who played Hans Solo and Indiana Jones learning to be vulnerable. It helped the show be both comical and touching in a balanced way. However, there was also a lot of humour that felt forced and awkward. It has that American style of writing where it feels like everyone’s improvising all the time, which to me is just annoying, and many scenes of dialogue feel like they go on for just a bit too long. I cringed more often than I laughed.
The most significant problem with Shrinking is that it felt empty. I was left feeling like I’d been tricked into watching a shallow sitcom. Perhaps I should’ve known, all the signs were there: Jason Segel of How I Met Your Mother playing the lead role, the thirty-minute run time of each episode, the fact that it comes from Bill Lawrence, the writer of Scrubs. But with an intriguing set up I was led to expect an original and unique idea to be fully explored, not just used as an excuse for the plot to bring all the characters together for sitcom style relationships to play out.
Watching Shrinking made me realise that the term ‘drama comedy’ is flawed. What does drama comedy mean? Inherently, it’s something that incorporates elements of drama and comedy, but that is still a pretty broad definition. ‘Drama comedy’ is a term that describes genre, while ‘sitcom’ is a term that describes form. Technically, all sitcoms are drama comedies, but not all drama comedies are sitcoms.
Form in television is much harder to identify these days. It used to be the case that you could spot a sitcom from the two or three recurring sets, the single camera set up and the tinny laugh track. A soap was that thing you watched once a week with the enormous cast and never-ending story. The rise of streaming services has resulted in fewer people watching live television, and the diminished popularity of the soap opera and the sitcom. The modern audience expects more complicated and expansive filming techniques- multiple cameras, a variety of shot types and lots of different locations. The form of ‘sitcom’ has been abandoned, leaving us with a genre (drama comedy) without a form.
The original sitcoms of the nineties were hugely successful. The likes of Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air were enormously popular and are still loved today. In 2018, the BBC estimated that Friends was the most watched show on Netflix, and it has reportedly been costing Netflix around a hundred million dollars a year to keep Friends on the platform. Despite the timeless popularity of Friends, it could never be recreated today. It’s hard to imagine a modern audience responding well to a laugh track or going to see a TV show filmed live. Those constraints of the form are simply outdated, but I would argue that it was these constraints that enabled their success.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Peep Show and The Office (both UK and US versions) are examples of more recent experimental takes on the form. It is safe to say that nearly all modern sitcoms are unique in their approach, and the original constraints have been left behind. It is not the case that all modern sitcoms are unsuccessful, but it is notable that the shows that have seen success have had a particular focus on form. The Office, for example uses the concept of a documentary to give the show meaning and add unique comic value, while Peep Show uses POV shots and internal monologues for similar effect.
Shrinking is formless, hence feeling empty. It has abandoned the rules of form to adapt to a modern audiences’ expectations, but still fallen back on the conventions of the genre. It’s marketed as a drama comedy but is a sitcom in disguise, and therefore is disappointing.
What I'm ultimately saying is this: form is important, as it is inherently connected to structure and story. When I hear something described as a 'drama comedy', I'm hearing formless.
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