"Shrinking" champions Gen Z mental health with care and empathy, not condescension

Nobody covets growing up in this day and age. 

The pandemic radically aged the brains of teenage girls. Unregulated social media poses a hindrance to the development of young people. The planet's burning up and wars are raging. So do young people these days actually get to be young? 

The Apple TV+ comedy series "Shrinking" answers some of these concerns through its resident young person, Alice (Lukita Maxwell). In the therapy-forward half-hour comedy, Alice is the teen daughter of a grieving therapist, Jimmy (Jason Segel). When the show kicks off, Alice and Jimmy are left reeling from the emotional fallout of their mother and wife, Tia's (Lilan Bowden) sudden death from a car accident. While Jimmy sinks in his grief, Alice keeps him afloat by becoming a parentified child, even though she is gasping for air too.

In season two of "Shrinking," after much-needed healing, Jimmy is fully back in the father role. He has gained some of Alice's trust back after working to mend the father-daughter relationship in the first season. So Alice relinquishes caretaking her father out of his grief. But the show doesn't shy away from Alice's slight concerns about her father's flakiness while also allowing the teen to grieve her mother in light-hearted, poignant moments. "Shrinking" gives its audience a raw glimpse of a young person's grief and mental illness and handles it with delicate sincerity and sometimes a little mess.

When the audience is first introduced to Alice, she's dejected. The teenager is an expert at hiding her pain because there is no space for it in her home, due to her father being steeped in his grief. He is partying hard, hooking up with sex workers and has all but given up on life. They live two separate existences, with one being a lonely, singular experience of grief. She tells him in the first season that washing her soccer jersey when it's dirty or serving her blueberries isn't enough to mend what's been broken. She explains, "You've been walking around for so long acting like it only happened to you, but it happened to us. It happened to me and I've been dealing with it on my own because I had to." It's evident that her mental health hasn't been a priority for her father. The audience sees fragments of Alice's depression and impulsive decision-making in season one, but she's ultimately still the kid who had to grow up too fast.

However, her words prick something in Jimmy. He has altogether abandoned his teen daughter in the midst of both of their losses. His lack of emotional availability pushes her closer to their nosey neighbor Liz (Christa Miller), her husband, Derek (Ted McGinley) and Paul (Harrison Ford), a senior therapist and colleague of her dad. Despite the help from her community, she's stuck feeling like she's not a normal teenager. When her friend asks her to underage drink under a bridge, she begrudges teenagers to Paul because "they all act so immature." He explains to her that not everyone young has been through grief like she has. Paul pushes her to revel in her youth, saying, "Are you gonna let your grief drown you?"

So she doesn't. But it's not long into the second season where all of Alice's defense mechanisms come crumbling down. She is seemingly in a better, healed space. Alice and Jimmy's relationship has become healthier. But with progress, comes growing pains. During their mini-therapy sessions, she admits to Paul that she's been watching her dad sleep because "she can't stop thinking he's going to go back to the way he was after mom died." Alice is still taking care of Jimmy even when he doesn't realize it. It's a dynamic that is a result of what she's been through, Paul tells her. But by the first couple of episodes, "Shrinking" ditches Alice's chronic worry for other people and takes her straight to the core of the teenage mess and angst. 

One of these teen stressors is passing her driver's license exam, which she obviously takes in a car. It's not lost on the audience that the very thing that caused Tia's death is something Alice has to master. The teen even begins to have vivid memories of her mom driving her to soccer practice. It's like she's haunted by her mother's love and the brevity of her life. Her grief unfairly colors what is supposed to be a normal, teen experience for her. 

In contrast, Jimmy is confronted by a harsh reality — Louis, the drunk driver who killed Tia, played by "Shrinking" writer/producer Brett Goldstein. It's a destabilizing development, but the show handles it with care. Jimmy struggles to tell Alice and in a darkly humourous moment, blurting out, "Speaking of cars, do you remember what happened to your mom in one? Godd**nit!"

Alice seems to handle the news well, despite saying "Lately I just feel like my brain's about to explode."

"You ruined my life you piece of s**t. Eat my a**!" she writes in a letter to Louis.

Alice even shows Paul the letter, and he says, "Quite a letter. A lot of F-bombs." To which she replies "Well, it's not to my Congress person. It's to the guy who killed my mom!" Her ability to process these swallowing emotions with grace is a sign she's doing the therapy process the way she's supposed to, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's working, or maybe it's too slow at fixing what feels irretrievably broken. With her new driver's license in hand, she does what is impulsive and probably the wrong thing to do. She goes to see the guy who killed her mom — twice.

Alice recklessly goes to Louis' workplace and confronts him against Paul's warning to see him again. Immediately, Alice goes in hot and he attempts to de-escalate by telling her he can imagine how she's felt. She screams out in the coffee shop, "Shut up! Shut the f**k up! F**k you!" It's unnerving when she slams her hands against a table and storms out. Alice is completely emotionally undone and seeks comfort in Liz's son, Connor, who is also in love with Alice and her best friend's boyfriend.

In true teen fashion, Alice's rashness led to bad decision-making but "Shrinking" never scolds her for her pain or choices. Instead, the writing chooses to humanize her as the young person she is — the young person she really hasn't been able to be through her grief. It is a refreshing look at how a young person has grappled with an insurmountable trauma. In a young generation so rife with mental health struggles, Alice is just like every other 17-year-old girl. She's just dealing with what feels like the weight of the world on her shoulders the best way she can.