SPOILER ALERT: This piece lightly spoils the first episode of Shrinking Season 3, titled “My Bad.”
Jason Segel’s Jimmy Laird has come a long way from when viewers first met him in his backyard pool with two younger women late at night in Season 1 through the lens of his neighbor Liz (Christa Miller).
Now in Season 3, the central therapist character has new obstacles to face with the coming high school graduation of his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) and pushes from his mentor and boss Paul Rhoades (Harrison Ford) to get back out there in the dating scene.
“We spent Seasons 1 and 2 getting Jimmy to zero, getting him out of this hole of grief and depression he was in. The worst thing happened, and then [in] Season 2 [he was] cleaning up the wreckage that still existed in his life,” Segel told Deadline ahead of Season 3’s release. “I think at zero, Jimmy looked forward and realized,’ Oh, my God, everything that I had constructed is going away. My wife is gone. My daughter is leaving.’ I think where we find Jimmy is, ‘Oh, no, did the best part happen? Is the good part of life done? And now I just endure the next 40 years as an observer?’”
Jimmy hints at as much when talking to Louis (Brett Goldstein), a major catalyst for the whole story, at the park one day, sharing how he’s dealing with the possibility of Alice attending college on the other side of the country.
“I think some of us have dealt with that, been at a life changing moment or a crossroads, or something significant ends, and you’re like, ‘Well, I guess it’s done.’ And so, yeah, moving forward sounds fun, but it also means stepping into the unknown,” Segel added.
As the first episode goes on, there becomes reason for Paul to discuss Jimmy’s dating life and how he should get back on the horse. For those who might not remember, Jimmy met Sofi (Cobie Smulders) in Season 2 when he bought a yellow Mini Cooper from her to give to Alice for her birthday, and sparks were evident between the pair, who have some help from previously starring together in How I Met Your Mother. Sofi has yet to return in Season 3. She is absent from Episode 301.
“I was just watching this wire walker named Philippe Petit do a Q and A. He walked between the Twin Towers on a tightrope, and he talks about this moment where his weight is on his back foot, which is firmly on the building, and then he has to make this decision to transfer his weight onto the front foot, onto the wire, and he knows that it’s either going to be communing with the gods or falling to his death,” Segel said. “I think that that’s kind of what Jimmy feels like. Like ‘I have no idea what happens when I transfer my weight into the future.’”
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Other characters face their own forms of moving forward, which work well into the combined hour-long first episode of Season 3.
“We knew that Apple liked to drop two for each season, and we also knew that the subject that we were going to do in the first couple episodes was something we could easily make an hour out of. So we decided very early on to combine them,” the actor added. “I will say, I keep saying, ‘We.’ All of those decisions really go through Bill [Lawrence] and Brett [Goldstein] and this amazing writers room. My job as a writer on the show is actually really simple, and I come in at the end when scripts are very close to being done and chip in my two cents and maybe add some jokes, but the real Galaxy brain thinkers are in the writers room and are just doing such an amazing job.”
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