Shrinking Recap: Goodwill

When Paul advises Sean to meet his dad with love and goodwill, there’s no particular reason to think his advice isn’t sound. Sure, we’re not even at the halfway point of the season yet, and Sean’s issues with his dad will likely be a recurring source of drama throughout the show. But Paul is (we’re told) a great therapist, and his advice is borne out by evidence from almost every episode of this show. It’s often necessary to set aside your justifiable frustrations with someone and meet them on their own terms in order to move forward and bridge some gap in understanding. Successful couples therapy, for example, relies on a version of that idea: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?”

But sometimes there’s a real empathy imbalance, with one party much more willing to compromise and listen than the other, and that’s the case here. Sean earnestly opening up to his dad seems like it should work, because opening up is the key to pretty much all progress on Shrinking. However, Tim can only see this interaction as an accusation brought on by therapists, who blame everything on the parents. For all the goodwill Sean brings to this conversation, to Tim he just appears ungrateful. That failure at communication leads Sean back to his old patterns: getting in a fight, where he has no hope of winning, just to feel something, to externalize his pain. It’s the quick payoff of Paul’s warning last week about the “bad shit” he saw coming.

“Honesty Era” doesn’t take advantage of all the momentum generated by last week’s biggest moments; there’s no sign of Derrick and no follow-up to Brian and Louis’s meeting. But it does take care of some necessary housekeeping, including getting Jimmy and Gaby back on friendly terms. At the beginning of the episode, she’s still insistent on keeping her distance from him, but by the end he’s eating dinner at her mom’s house, fresh off a bit of truth-telling that Gaby actually takes well.

We’ve heard a lot about Gaby’s issues with her sister, Courtney, lately, but this is the first episode to really spotlight them. Courtney is adamant that their mom (Marla Gibbs!) needs cataract surgery, but as the more successful sister, Gaby’s words carry more weight. It’s easy to understand why Courtney would be frustrated when she’s the one who takes care of their mom full time and when Gaby is still clearly holding their past baggage over her head. Gaby had to take care of her sister when Courtney was still using on and off, and she has been working for years now on making it up to her. But how long will it be before Gaby grants Courtney permission to have a life of her own again?

Now, we haven’t seen quite enough of Courtney for me to feel a strong connection with her or with their sister bond; I’d like to see her just spend some time with the gang so we could see her in another mode. (Her casual teasing of Jimmy about his height is the only moment when I felt like I really saw her being herself.) Still, this is a solid story, and it’s a smart way of temporarily resolving the tension between Jimmy and Gaby.

Jimmy is in a prominent supporting role all over this episode, playing second fiddle to Gaby, Alice, and Liz. He doesn’t exactly know how to check in with his daughter after the secret of her hookup with Connor comes out; Summer is furious, and she has a right to be, but there’s no point in making Alice feel even guiltier. Gaby later scolds Jimmy, but I don’t know — I thought he handled that first interaction as best as he could, and I’m certainly no Jimmy defender. His offer to “storm away” on Alice’s behalf (since her bruised boob hurts too much to move) is pretty sweet, and it even brings a reluctant smile to her face. But letting her ditch school to get a tattoo is on a whole other level, and it’s sweet as always to see the two bonding. Jimmy even gets guilted into a matching tat of Tia’s initials.

The Jimmy of “Honesty Era” is a bit more sensitive than usual, but Liz is always there to take him down a peg. Thanks to Jimmy mentioning that they ran into Liz’s ex, Mac (Josh Hopkins, a fellow Cougar Town alum), together, Derek is jealously moping around the house. But that’s only one of the ways Jimmy’s actions have fucked up Liz’s month. His “needy penis” got him into trouble with Gaby and ruined the friend group; his inappropriate therapy methods introduced her to Sean, a business partner she has now lost; his antagonistic interaction with the construction crew means Liz’s front yard is spotted with beer bottles; his daughter copied his self-destructive behavior by sleeping with Connor, who has now missed his first week of classes. Even if Jimmy isn’t personally responsible, everything seems to come back to him.

Of course, he’s completely correct in attempting to point out Liz’s culpability in all this. Many of Liz’s problems are her own fault, and she knows it. But he does have a way of creating a lot of unnecessary chaos with his actions, and he makes for an easy target in this moment. It’s also just good to see Jimmy and Liz sharing scenes again, even if they’re bickering as usual. They were one of the strongest character duos of season one.

Shrinking is pretty adept at building out those different character pairings; basically, any pair of characters you can pick has their own specific vibe and comedic angle. Paul and Brian’s relationship, for example, is a minor one compared to most of the central friendships, but there’s an obvious appeal to the drastic contrast in their energies. As in season one, it’s not totally believable that these two characters would be spending so much time together — you can tell that the writers reverse engineered the idea after wanting a B-plot for Paul and Brian — but it works pretty well with each of them offering some insight into the other.

For Brian, Paul is yet another example of the possible perils of becoming a father before you’ve totally worked through your self-centeredness. Paul got married young and cheated on his wife, Susan, after they grew apart when he was always on the road for book tours. What if something similar somehow happened with Brian and Charlie, and Brian ended up estranged from his kid?

Brian’s adoption story line is an ongoing part of this season, and there’s no particular resolution to his concerns in this episode; it’s featured here mostly as a quick progress report on the baby search. Paul, as usual, is more central. With Susie in town, staying at his house along with Meg and her annoying husband, Dave, it’s the perfect time for Brian to come over and get some signatures for the family-trust revisions. After an escape to Brian’s office, Paul musters up the courage to ask Susie why she’s really here. Her initial reply — that she wanted to talk to him again before he died of Parkinson’s — might be a dark joke, but there’s also a lot of truth to it. Paul and Susie won’t be around forever, and they shouldn’t waste their time playing chicken.

There’s a nice sense of history in the conversation, during which they completely make peace with Susie admitting that he wasn’t the only one who made mistakes in their marriage; he wasn’t right to cheat, but she resented his success, which contributed to the growing distance between them. It goes back to that core idea: There’s rarely just one wrong party when a relationship breaks down. The quicker you accept that truth, the easier it is to see what really went wrong.

Progress Notes

• Jimmy and Paul have agreed to both make themselves available to Sean from now on, though Paul is still in charge when it comes to his treatment.

• “You said he looked like one of the little statue boys who pee in fountains, and you fucked him anyway.”

• “So you grew up taking care of an addict and then you married one … Interesting.”

• “I’m so bored with this shit. Everyone is.” “Who’s everyone, Paul? It’s just three of us who work here.”

• “At first, I thought it might be tricky, you know, when I start dating again, to have another woman’s initials on my arm, but then I realized it’s a pretty cool way to tell someone my wife’s dead.”

• Brian’s excuse about needing a notary was some good improvising, though he probably didn’t need to add the “can’t walk” part.

• I’m so glad the adoption advocate wasn’t a one-off character. When Brian not so discreetly mouths “no” at the idea of adopting a kid with a medical condition, this interaction happens: “You can just say ‘no.’ Lots of bad people say ‘no.’” “Can we send it back?” “Well, there are no returns, but there is a 30-day exchange policy.” “Really?” “No. It’s a baby.”

• There’s no rule book for how to handle the situation when your surrogate daughter sleeps with your biological son, so I really like the moment when Alice apologizes to Liz for screwing up with Connor.

• “You hurt Connor, and I love him more than anyone in the world. But I love you second best.” “You have two other sons.” “I said what I said.”

• The concept of “pick and sip” is a cute detail for Paul and Susie’s marriage, and it’s fun to see it come back during Meg’s speech.