'Shrinking' & the Trauma Sitcom; the Warm, Funny 'Adolesence' Team (Really!)Co-creator Bill Lawrence and the cast of the Apple TV+ hopeful explain their secret sauce. Plus: Stephen Graham & Jack Thorne
Greetings from Los Angeles, where it’s been once again a busy weekend of FYC events as Emmy nominations voting — finally! — is set to start on June 12. Last night, I attended a live podcast taping of Erin and Sara Foster’s The World’s First Podcast, part of an FYC event for Erin’s Netflix show Nobody Wants This. And tonight I’ll be the one hosting the live podcast, talking to the creators and director of High Potential and the show’s star, Kaitlin Olson. If you’re reading this in time, it may not be too late to RSVP! And if not, you can hear the conversation on an upcoming episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. I was also holding a microphone on Friday night, talking to Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne before a screening of the first episode of their Netflix series, Adolescence. The two have joked that their working relationship is more like a marriage, particularly after the months of interviews they’ve been doing together since Adolescence’s smash debut on Netflix in March. “I got a message from Stephen’s wife this morning with a photo of the two of us [captioned], ‘Aww, husbands!’” Thorne said as the two sat down for our conversation. “She says he’s my weird husband, which is great,” Graham added. Thorne and Graham have a funny, warm dynamic together, which can feel like a real contrast to the bleak themes of Adolescence, about a teenage boy accused of murdering a classmate. The series was Graham’s idea, inspired by a series of real knife crimes in the U.K.; in addition to creating the series with Thorne, Graham stars as the boy’s overwhelmed but loving father. “Look, we’re not preachers, we weren’t standing on a soapbox and shouting,” Graham said. “We just said, ‘How can this happen?’” It was Thorne’s job to do the research into online incel culture and the other factors that might inspire a child to commit this kind of crime. “I dwell in darkness and I’m very comfortable there,” Thorne said of that investigation, probably only half-joking. The bigger challenge, they agreed, was knowing that if they told this story correctly, it might inspire real societal change — and it may already have. “It was always, how do we do this?” Thorne continues. “How do we go to those places that we need to go to? The scary thing was always, if you screw this up, you’ve lost the chance to do something really remarkable.” Need some levity after all that? Me too. So let’s hear from the reigning king of modern feel-good TV, and his vision for what I genuinely think might be the perfect life: a bunch of adults who have time to hang out together in person consistently.
‘A Big Messy Found Family Show About Grief’
There’s a magical thing that happens at some point in nearly every Bill Lawrence production. Wherever the show begins — whether it’s a workplace comedy like Spin City or Ted Lasso, or the more high-concept efforts like Cougar Town and Shrinking — it eventually expands, creating a whole world surrounding the nugget of the idea that sold the pitch in the first place. Lawrence puts it pretty succinctly, talking about Shrinking: “Even more than a workplace show, we thought on some level it was a found family show.” Shrinking, which is eligible this Emmy cycle for its second season and is currently shooting its third, is technically about a pretty complicated concept: Therapist Jimmy (played by Jason Segel) throws out the ethical rulebook when it comes to treating his patients and starts healing his own grief from his wife’s death in the process. Early episodes revolve around his relationship with coworkers played by Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, as well as one of his patients, played by Luke Tennie. And in the old days of network comedies, says Lawrence, that might have been the end of it. “I’m a dinosaur,” says the self-deprecating Lawrence, 57, whose earliest TV credits include Boy Meets World and The Nanny. “When I used to do sitcoms, you would go, ‘Hey, everybody works in the mayor’s office, and you never leave there.’ That's Spin City. And there was never room to do both.” With the freedom of a streaming service, Lawrence says, he and his Shrinking co-creators Brett Goldstein and Segel knew that, even with the concept of a show about therapists, there was always some very human messiness baked in. “I think the trick is to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do a big messy found family show about grief,’” Lawrence tells me. “Just like we all do, everybody on Shrinking has fucked up things going on in their lives. Everybody is three or four steps removed from some kind of trauma, which is true in the world. And it’s also got to somehow be funny.”
Why Can’t We Be Friends? Allowing even the famously gruff Ford to join in on the comedy, Shrinking makes the funny stuff look easy. The really impressive part, to me, begins midway through the first season, when you realize the show is making real time not just for the central trio of therapists and their problems, but also for the people who surround them — particularly Jimmy’s meddling but loving neighbor Liz (Christa Miller) and his until recently estranged best friend, Brian (Michael Urie). Brian is so tangential to the action in the show’s first episode that Urie was given scenes from the second episode for his audition. “I read the script, and it was beautiful and hilarious, and I thought, ‘I don’t know what they have in store for this character, but I can tell there’s a lot to mine, and they will mine it,’” Urie says. Through the two seasons, Brian has bonded in individual ways with almost all of the other main characters, including Miller’s Liz, who ends the second season accepting the job as the nanny for the child Brian and his husband are adopting. Miller is a veteran of Lawrence’s shows Spin City, Scrubs and Cougar Town and is also his wife — though she’s still not giving her praise away easily. “Part of Bill’s genius — don’t tell him I told you that — is he really spends a lot of time on casting and chemistry,” Miller says. “We’ve all become close friends, and our relationships have organically grown, but I think that Bill’s talent is weaving everyone in together. And it’s also life. I like my friends to be friends with all my friends.” There’s an element of wish-fulfillment in all the hanging out on Shrinking, as with so many of television’s best shows about friendship. Urie says he figures the characters, who are all adults with jobs and other obligations, must all live close together to manage to see each other in person in Los Angeles so often. But there’s a realistic element to these friendships as they grow as well, particularly how much of that growth happens offscreen. “Sometimes we jump into the middle of a conversation, and we don’t know why these people are together; they just hang out,” says Urie. “I don’t know at what point I became Harrison’s [character’s] lawyer, but I’m his lawyer. We’ve watched this chosen family form over the seasons.” Lawrence admits that sometimes he and the writers take too much liberty with that shorthand, and then have to go back and add scenes that explain the connections among the characters. But with the show now in production on its third season, with hopes for more to come, he remains committed to building that world even bigger. “You can expand the world a little bit, because we know the people and how they relate to each other,” Lawrence says. The second season introduced Goldstein’s Louis, the driver responsible for Jimmy’s wife’s death; the third will add a new character played by Lawrence vet Michael J. Fox. “It just makes it easier for the world to be less claustrophobic.” Want even more Shrinking? Look out for tomorrow’s episode of the podcast, which features my conversation with the show’s star Jason Segel.
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'Shrinking' & the Trauma Sitcom; the Warm, Funny 'Adolesence' Team (Really!)
June 02, 2025
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