Therapy rarely begins smoothly. Initial sessions tend to be colored by weeping, hesitancy and half-truths as the clinician and client get a feel for each other. You could say the same of many TV shows, but since we’re talking about “Shrinking,” surely you see parallels. Season 1 was all awkward introductions, with Jason Segel’s Jimmy Laird sticking his hand out for a nice-to-meet-you shake, with standard-issue TV wounded healer listed on his Hello My Name Is tag. Jimmy, our psychologist, is barely making it through talk therapy sessions because he’s not quite holding it together.

We’re dropped into Jimmy’s life not long after his wife died, leaving him and their teen daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) to make sense of the unthinkable. At work, his mentor Paul (Harrison Ford) acts more like a father figure toward Jimmy, and his colleague Gaby (Jessica Williams), who was also Tia’s best friend, ends up sleeping with him.

All this spins around Jimmy’s wild prescriptions to his most unstable patients, including Sean (Luke Tennie), a veteran whose tour in Afghanistan left him with explosive rage and PTSD. But just as Jimmy starts to pull his life together again, his patient Grace (Heidi Gardner) pushes her abusive ex off a cliff.

Listing these catch-up details reveals the introductory episodes’ overemphasis on the situation instead of leaning into the comedy of it all. The cast’s performances and undeniable chemistry shored up the many fissures threatening to collapse the premise’s integrity—at least, enough to pull us through.

Around 18 months after that ending, the healing can officially begin.

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The only obligation “Shrinking” has is to make us laugh, and to the credit of its creators Segel, Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, that quickly became its emphasis midway through its 10-episode first season. Simply maintaining its funny wouldn’t be especially remarkable, regardless of Ford’s admirable comic........

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