‘Shrinking’ Co-Creator Bill Lawrence Breaks Down Season 3 Finale And Lingering Thread Of Jimmy’s Father

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the Shrinking Season 3 finale.

There seems to be more to the tension between Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) and his father (Jeff Daniels) that could pop up in Season 4 of Apple TV‘s Shrinking.

Daniels boarded Season 3 to play his role as Randy, “a charmer” in Jimmy’s words to his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) and a smooth talker of sorts to everyone but Jimmy. In his frustration that his father hasn’t changed his behavioral patterns at all, which is reflected in how he skips out on Alice’s high school graduation ceremony after originally coming to town because she invited him, Jimmy lashes out at his mentor and now former boss Paul (Harrison Ford) right before he moves to Connecticut to be closer to his daughter Meg (Lily Rabe) and her family.

Co-creator Bill Lawrence shared that this thread was tweaked as a result of Apple wanting to continue Shrinking in more seasons.

“If we thought we were going to be done after the third season, we would have resolved that in some way positive or negative [in] the third season,” he told Deadline. “One of the things that was really tricky for us is, we all realized how much fun we were having making the show, and Apple — very nicely — was like, ‘Why are you stopping? We’d love for you guys to keep doing this.’ [So] we had to put in some stories — so it doesn’t feel completely new  — that will still be told when we get to come back up and do it.”

Lawrence also unpacks the completion of various other character arcs in the core ensemble and hints at what could be in store for Season 4 when the time comes in the below interview with a shoutout to Neil Goldman, who served as co-showrunner on Season 3 and will do so on Season 4.

DEADLINE: What did Maya’s (Sherry Cola) death add to this season for Gaby? Coming off of Derek and his heart problem, what role does death play in Shrinking?

LAWRENCE: It’s just important to remind people that these therapists, they gravitated towards that work, not just because it’s a job, but because they want to try and help people and make their lives better. We anticipated that if we were going to go on and do a new story of Shrinking after the first three-season story that we wanted to explore some other things with patients. The guy who Harrison Ford’s character is originally based on — Phil Stutz, there’s a documentary about him called Stutz on Netflix that Jonah [Hill directed] — he has Parkinson’s. He’s a great therapist.

He started at Bellevue doing trauma, and he said, it got hard, it just wasn’t necessarily for him. We have Harrison’s character say that, and for us, that opened up the idea of, we had one character, it had always been in our heads that it was for her. Somebody that grew up with addiction, which is a huge part of trauma therapy, often, and was ready to dive in — not to say that’s not funny when you have characters like Wally and Dan, the OCD young lady and Dan, who’s introverted and not good with social stuff, that’s funny, but the heavier stuff, I think could be a really [good] story. So with Gaby, who hadn’t really gotten the same level of body blows as Jimmy or Harrison, or even Liz or some of the other characters, it was fun to watch Jessica do it.

DEADLINE: Gaby’s proposal also felt like a completion, in a way, of her pattern of being insecure and and finding ways to not commit. Why did you want to end on that note for her in combination with the trauma center stuff?

LAWRENCE: There’s two things going on. You never know what’s gonna happen in TV. The end of the third season, 80% of it is what Brett and Jason and I pitched when we pitched the three-season story. We focused the pitch around Jimmy, but we gave all the other characters pitches too. We said, [for] Jimmy, it’s going to be about grief and then forgiveness and then moving forward.

Jason’s such a giving partner on this show, so knowing that everybody else has journeys to still take, we always knew that Liz is somebody that dreaded being an empty nester and that her three season-arc would end with her and her husband closer than ever, but empty nesters. We knew that Michael Urie’s character [about] a guy that was a commit-a-phobe and afraid of caring for anybody other than himself, and a narcissist, in many ways, would end with him having a nuclear family and embracing that. We knew that Luke Tennie’s arc would be having to come through all this and build his own life and then wrestle with, what do you have to give back, and what are you supposed to do for other people when these gifts were done for you?

We knew that one of the biggest things was that Lukita/Alice had to leave. The coolest thing is that, right when Jimmy gets his act together, all the people in his world that were his safety net get to go. We were always telling this story because we wanted all the characters to move forward, and we just got lucky that a lot of the things really help us in telling another completely new story after this.

DEADLINE: Are we supposed to feel bad for Jimmy that he’s lashing out at the end here, and then Paul comes in and reconnects him to Sophie and leaves him? Is that their full goodbye? Will he learn his lesson?

LAWRENCE: I think that push was supposed to feel like Jimmy’s gotten over the mountain, and that no matter what it ends up looking like, the thought of that character being alone for the rest of his life, I think, is super sad. It’s hard to watch that last episode. Whether it’s Cobie Smulders — whether it’s Sophie or not — I’m not gonna lock that up for people, knowing that this is a guy that has — if you’re a TV fan and you’re a TV nerd, you watch TV like I watch TV — then you know that Jimmy’s journey to whether or not he finds the next chapter in his life and who that might be is without a doubt a story we’ll tell.

DEADLINE: That was another broad question I had with a lot of these character arcs, like you were saying earlier, reaching their conclusions. Does that make room for new cast? Do you want to keep everybody?

LAWRENCE: I love these people so much on a personal level, and as artists, they’re all going to stay in the show. The secondary cast will all stay in the show. The show wouldn’t be the same without Rachel Stubbington who plays Summer, much less Damon [Wayans Jr.], or Cobie, or Jeff Daniels or Mike Fox. I mean, I’d kill to keep him working. It made me so happy. He’s my first mentor. So, we’re going to make the world bigger, I’m sure, because that’s part of the fun. People know the show and seem to want to come play, but everybody’s gonna get to see the core characters.

DEADLINE: You had three seasons planned with themes for each season so far. Have you settled on a theme for four yet?

LAWRENCE: We’re not gonna tell you yet, but we’re coming up. We got another story to tell. In a cool way, hopefully when you see it, you’ll be like, ‘Oh, I’m interested to see how this plays out.’ The trick on shows like this, which is so interesting, nowadays, when I go pitch streaming shows, I generally pitch a beginning, in the middle and an end. And then people go, ‘Oh, my God.’ Like Ted Lasso — I’m not running that show, but Jason Sudeikis is back and the old writers are. We did the beginning, middle and end of the first story we pitched. And I think people will get it when the new Ted Lasso hits, they’ll go, ‘Oh, there’s a completely different story.’ This isn’t season four of that team. That’s part of the fun.

DEADLINE: I’m excited for that women’s team arc.

Make sure too, in the Shrinking of it all, Brett, is so busy, because he’s doing his own show, and he still writes a lot with us, which is awesome. But the co-showrunner, that is Neil Goldman, and he’s been there running the show with Brett me and Jason from the start.

I’m still running it with him, which is part of the fun. I’m a bossypants, I definitely don’t treat him as a co-worker. He’s my equal. We’ve worked together for years. He stayed on Scrubs the whole time, created a bunch of his own shows, and he’s been there since the start. I just worry that sometimes [between] Brett, Jason and I — I realized, like, ‘Oh, no one’s given Neil props,’ but yeah, the writing staff has stayed the same the first three seasons, and this year, two writers moved on to work on Brett’s new show. But otherwise, it’s the same staff.

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