Bill Lawrence, Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel knew all along how they wanted Shrinking to end.
Well, not the end, exactly.
Despite concluding the three-season arc the creators originally envisioned, Shrinking will continue, with the entire main cast confirmed to return for a fourth season. But the season three finale did wrap things up pretty neatly, with Segel’s character, Jimmy, moving past the grief that consumed him after the death of his wife — at least far enough to finally go on a long-delayed date with Cobie Smulders’ Sofi.
“We had that ending from when we did the pitch,” says Goldstein, who started work on Shrinking in 2021 while also continuing to star on and write Ted Lasso (also with Lawrence). He’ll be back with a fourth season of Ted Lasso later this summer, a juggling act Goldstein seems to relish: “I don’t know how I do it. I think my brain works better when there’s 300 things going on at once than if it were just one.”
Perhaps the new season of Ted Lasso, with Jason Sudeikis’ Ted now coaching a women’s soccer team in England, will be a model for what comes next with Shrinking, which will feature all of the same characters on a new set of adventures. But Goldstein says that Shrinking has always been evolving as they made it, even with that three-season arc firmly in place. “It changes with the cast — once you fall in love with them and you start writing for them,” he told me in a recent call from New York.
Take Ted McGinley’s Derek, for example. Introduced as the happy-go-lucky husband to Christa Miller’s nosy, nurturing neighbor, Liz, in season one, Derek “is funny — he’s just a fucking assassin,” as Goldstein puts it. “You bring him in at the end of a scene, he says an amazing line and he walks out. And then, because Ted McGinley is so good — and because the relationship with Christa was so good — you start developing that. In season two and beyond, Derek has a lot more depth because we fell in love with Ted.”
The same is true for Miller’s character Liz, says Goldstein, or even smaller characters like Rachel Stubington’s Summer, a friend of Jimmy’s teenage daughter, Alice (played by Lukita Maxwell). “I don’t know if we had a plan for Summer, but she was so fucking funny,” Goldstein says. “You go, ‘Let’s keep Summer in it, let’s find ways to involve her.’”
The only problem when you’ve got so many characters that you love, though, is that you’ve got to find a way to make room for all of them in a show that feels breezy even in episodes that stretch longer than the average comedy. “For a show that seems very casual, it’s so hard to write,” says Goldstein, who worked as a writer on all three seasons in addition to playing Louis, the man responsible for Jimmy’s wife Tia’s fatal car accident. “We’re trying to tell a season-long story, but also trying to tell an episodic story — and we’re also trying to service every single character to give them a full arc. It’s why it takes us so long to write it, because you often get to the end of an outline and then you’re like, ‘Fuck, we’ve left out someone.’”
The arrival of Goldstein’s character, Louis, in season two, having served his time for causing Tia’s death and seeking redemption, was, in some ways, a challenge to the extent to which Shrinking could push its central conceit of following therapists as they try to take their own advice.
“Louis coming in is almost an experiment,” says Goldstein. “Here are these happy people, and here’s the worst, most challenging version of something to deal with. It’s such an easy thing to say, ‘Oh, forgiveness is important.’ But then you go, ‘Well, here’s the hardest version of it. How do you feel?’”
Louis exits the show as a major character early in season three, moving to San Diego and beyond some of the guilt that’s plagued him. When he returns briefly later in the season, Goldstein says, it’s partly as yet another nudge to Jimmy to also move on — “it was kind of a way of going, ‘The guy who killed your wife can move forward, why are you still stuck?’” But when Goldstein showed up with his familiar facial hair, not the clean-shaven look he’d had to play Louis, he knew it would grab some fan attention, too. As he puts it, “I’m well aware that people are disgusted by my face without this beard.”
Funny Business
After developing the characters of Shrinking for so long, Goldstein and his fellow writers relish the moments when they can rely on the audience’s knowledge of their personalities instead of written monologues. Take the moment late in season three, when Jimmy drops Alice off at her high school graduation and tries to tell his daughter what her mother would say in that moment. Alice cuts him off to tell Jimmy she already knows. “Every single take I was crying at the monitor,” Goldstein tells me. “I found that so fucking moving, because you don’t need any words.”
But Shrinking is far from the only comedy series in this year’s Emmy race that has had many seasons to grow its characters, and is now taking full advantage. Consider the episode in the final season of Hacks where Jean Smart’s Deborah and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava are forced to pose as a couple during a weekend retreat with a powerfully charismatic pair of lesbians played by Cherry Jones and Leslie Bibb. In season one or two, the scenario would have played out like yet another power play Deborah is pulling on Ava; with the two now more firmly established as equals, it becomes a hilarious back-and-forth, with Ava helping cover up Deborah’s faux pas even as Deborah is forcing Ava to sleep in the bathtub.
Over on Hulu, Only Murders in the Building has continued to evolve even while sticking to its one-murder-per-season format, with season five finding Selena Gomez, Martin Short and Steve Martin’s sleuths tangled up with billionaires and the mob. Sure, the show backed down from the threat of demolishing the Arconia — the titular building! — only to have the gang save it in the end. But Only Murders has grown both the affectionate, generation-spanning friendship among its three leads and its killer supporting cast, making New York theater legends like Michael Cyril Creighton and Jackie Hoffman into icons in their own right.
The biggest changes for The Bear may still be in its future — what will happen if Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy actually goes through on this promise to leave the restaurant business for good? — but there was plenty of room to expand in season four, particularly in what’s become the show’s signature departure episodes. Creator Christopher Storer has wisely recognized that, as much as the audience loves to watch the restaurant staff lock horns and make magic together in the kitchen, we learn even more by watching these characters off on their own, as in the Ayo Edebiri-written Sydney standalone “Worms” and the recent surprise prequel episode “Gary,” with Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach on a very memorable road trip.
Even in the world of network television, where consistency and familiarity are the name of the game, Abbott Elementary has found room to grow. The breakup of Quinta Brunson’s Janine and Tyler James Williams‘ Gregory may have only been temporary, but having Chris Perfetti’s Jacob way too affected by their split created so much more comedy out of what could have been a standard sitcom trope.
“In season five, we started to experiment with the characters,” Brunson told me previously. “What can we learn about them that’s new? What new character additions can we give them?
You even get more out of sight gags when you’ve developed characters this well, like the moment Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Barbara arrives at school wearing leather pants clearly borrowed from Lisa Ann Walter’s Melissa — no explanation required.
“Moving forward in season six, we’re going to apply a lot of what we learned in season five,” Brunson said. “My goal is to make season six feel… very comfortable, very lived in.”
