No one wants to grow up in this day and age.
The pandemic is fundamentally old man The brain of a teenage girl. Unregulated social media obstacle For the development of young people. The earth is on fire and wars are raging. The same goes for young people these days. actually become younger?
The Apple TV+ comedy series “Shrinking” answers some of these concerns through Alice (Lukita Maxwell), a young resident. A half-hour comedy about therapy, Alice is the teenage daughter of grieving therapist Jimmy (Jason Segel). When the show begins, Alice and Jimmy are mentally disturbed by the sudden death of their mother and wife Tia (Rylan Borden) in a car accident. While Jimmy sinks into grief, Alice continues to keep Jimmy afloat by being a child who is being raised by her parents, even though she is out of breath.
In Season 2 of “The Shrinking,” Jimmy fully returns to the role of father after his long-awaited healing. He regained some of Alice’s trust after trying to repair the father-daughter relationship in season 1. Alice, out of sadness, gives up caring for her father. But the show doesn’t shy away from Alice’s slight concerns about her father’s lack of temper, while simultaneously allowing the teenage girl to grieve her mother in moments that are both hilarious and heartbreaking. “Shrinking” offers a raw glimpse into the grief and mental illness of young people, treating it with delicate honesty and, at times, a little confusion.
When the audience is first introduced to Alice, she is disappointed. This teenager is good at hiding his pain because his father is immersed in grief and there is no space at home to hide it. He parties hard, dates sex workers, and has almost given up on life. They live two separate existences, one a solitary and singular experience of grief. She tells him in the first season that washing his soccer jersey when it gets dirty or feeding him blueberries isn’t enough to repair what’s broken. She explains: “You’ve been walking around for so long as if it only happened to you, but it happened to us too. It happened to me too, but I had to deal with it myself, so… I’ve been dealing with it myself.” It’s clear that her mental health was not a priority for her father. In season 1, audiences see snippets of Alice’s depression and impulsive decision-making, but at the end of the day, she’s still a child who had to grow up too soon.
“Shrinking” abandons Alice’s chronic worries about others and brings her directly to the heart of teenage confusion and anxiety.
But her words sting something in Jimmy. He completely abandoned his teenage daughter in the midst of both their losses. Because he is emotionally unavailable, she distances herself from her nosy neighbor Liz (Christa Miller), her husband Derek (Ted McGinley), and her father’s colleague Paul (Harrison Ford), a senior therapist. It will be shortened. Despite help from the community, she is stuck with the feeling that she is not a normal teenager. When her friend asks an underage person to drink alcohol under a bridge, she berates Paul for the teenagers’ behavior, saying, “They all act so immaturely.” He explains to her that not all young people experience grief the way she does. Paul urges her to enjoy her youth to the fullest, saying, “Are you going to drown in your sadness?”
So she doesn’t. But soon into the second season, all of Alice’s defense mechanisms crumble. She seems to be in a better, healing space. Alice and Jimmy’s relationship became healthier. But as you progress, there will be growing pains. During a mini-therapy session, she tells Paul that she used to watch her father sleep because “I can’t help but wonder if my father will go back to normal after my mother died.” I confessed. Alice still cares for Jimmy, even though Jimmy doesn’t realize it. Paul tells her it’s a dynamic that’s a result of what she’s been through. But by the first few episodes, “Shrinking” abandons Alice’s chronic concern for others and brings her directly to the heart of teenage confusion and angst.
One of the stressors for these teens is passing her driving test, which she apparently takes in her car. It is not conveyed to the audience that the very thing that caused Tia’s death is what Alice must master. The teenager is even starting to have vivid memories of her mother driving her to soccer practice. It’s as if he’s obsessed with his mother’s love and the brevity of his own life. Her grief unfairly colors what should be a normal teenage experience for her.
In contrast, Jimmy faces a harsh reality. Lewis is the drunk driver who killed Tia, played by “Shrinking” writer/producer Brett Goldstein. It’s a shaky development, but the show handles it carefully. Jimmy has a hard time telling Alice that, blurting out in a darkly humorous moment, “Speaking of cars, do you remember what happened to your mom in that car? Oh my god!”
Alice seems to be taking the news well, even though she says, “Recently, I feel like my brain is going to explode.”
“You ruined my life, you son of a bitch. Eat my a**le!” she writes to Louis.
Alice shows the letter to Paul, and he says, “It’s quite a letter. There’s a lot of F-bombs in it.” To which she replied, “Not to my councilman, but to the man who killed my mother!” Her ability to process these engulfed emotions with grace shows that she is working through the therapeutic process the way it’s supposed to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s working. Or maybe it’s too late to repair what you feel is irretrievably broken. With a new driver’s license in hand, she does something impulsive and probably wrong. She goes to see the man who killed her mother twice.
Alice recklessly goes to Louis’ workplace and defies Paul’s warning to see him again. Soon Alice becomes furious and he tries to de-escalate by saying he can imagine how she feels. She yelled at the coffee shop, “Shut up! Shut up! You son of a bitch!” I’m nervous when she slams her hands on the table and storms out. Alice is completely emotionless and seeks solace from Liz’s son Connor, who also loves Alice and her best friend’s boyfriend.
In true teen fashion, Alice’s indiscretions led to bad decisions, but “Shrinking” never scolds her for her pain or choices. Instead, the text chooses to humanize her as the young person she is: a young person who never really got over her grief. This is a refreshing work that depicts how young people deal with insurmountable trauma. In the younger generation suffering from mental health issues conflictAlice is just like any other 17-year-old girl. She’s just dealing with the weight of the world on her shoulders as best she can.
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