Jason Segel gets why you might think a series about grief and therapy isn’t an ideal show for audiences looking to laugh.
But when Segel and his Shrinking co-creators Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein (who met on Ted Lasso) started talking about teaming up for a new sitcom, he wanted to craft something that was not only going to make viewers grin, but tug on their heartstrings as well.
“Tonally, it sort of falls in the bullseye of the Venn diagram of all our tastes. The kind of James Brooks-tone of Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment that laughing your way through really difficult things is the only way we get through it,” Segel says in a video call from Los Angeles.
In the Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ series, which returns for its second season this week, Segel, 44, plays Jimmy, a grieving therapist who decides to start telling his struggling patients exactly what’s on his mind after he loses his wife in a car accident.
Much of Jimmy’s advice is played for laughs, but underneath the one-liners is a widower struggling to raise his teenage daughter as he navigates his new reality as a single dad.
His co-workers, including his boss and mentor Paul (played by Harrison Ford in a rare comedic turn) and Gaby (Jessica Williams), work together to help Jimmy piece his life back together. In its sophomore season, Jimmy has to confront the consequences of how he has decided to treat his clients. He also comes face-to-face with the person responsible for his wife’s death.
“The theme of this season is forgiveness and part of what that means is that in order to move forward, you have to let go of the stuff that’s been holding you back,” Segel says. “There’s a whoo-hoo approach these days to letting things go. That if you do that, you’ll somehow energetically set things down. But I think therapeutically, until you look at (some past traumas) real hard and find some acceptance around them and clean up the wreckage, you’ll find that you’re never going to be able to let anything (go).”
Segel got his start in 1999 with the role of Nick Andopolis in Freaks and Geeks. Five years later, he nabbed a role on CBS’ How I Met Your Mother, which ran for nine seasons. In between, he wrote and starred in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and became a fixture in the Judd Apatow Universe of films. In 2011, he helped relaunch the Muppets on the big screen. The following year, he charmed audiences alongside Emily Blunt in the romantic comedy The Five-Year Engagement (which he also wrote).
In 2014, after HIMYM ended, he started to branch out, playing David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour. Segel started to take some time between jobs and more creative risks, like starring in the sci-fi romance The Discovery in 2017 and 2020’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, a limited series about four adults who find out they are living in a virtual reality game.
In 2022, Segel played former Los Angeles Lakers assistant coach Paul Westhead in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.
He still likes to make people laugh. But the openhearted dialogue he hopes to have nowadays with projects like Shrinking reflects his maturing sensibilities.
“I haven’t been very strategic in my approach to my career, which I think is both a good thing and a bad thing,” Segel says. “I never tried to capitalize on my successes. Instead, I tried to figure out what was interesting for me to try next. Sometimes that wasn’t interesting to other people,” he continues with a laugh. “But for me, it was important to find these things out about myself.”
When it came to casting Shrinking, Segel didn’t want to make the safe choice. Along with Lawrence and Goldstein, they pitched Ford, who isn’t known for taking on many comedies.
“I think he watched some Ted Lasso and Forgetting Sarah Marshall and he came out the other side thinking, ‘I want to join these wackos,’” Segel laughs. “We didn’t know what type of funny he could be. But it turns out he’s capable of doing everything from set comedy pieces to being a reflective curmudgeon to being vulnerable to doing romantic comedy. He can do it all, but we knew that. I don’t think Harrison Ford has any limits.”
Segel knows the role of Jimmy has rubbed off on himself. During our conversation he spoke about the benefits of therapy. “Self-examination is the only way towards growth. What is it they say, ‘The unexamined life is scarcely worth living.’ I think that’s true.”
He even says he likes when his friends give him the unvarnished truth if he asks for advice.
“I think I like the hard truth,” he admits. “But there are terms like ‘radical honesty.’ I don’t subscribe to anything that has the word radical in front of it. I think people use the idea of radical honesty as an excuse to be a jerk … A lot of kids are doing ‘radical’ fill-in-the-blanks. But it just means you can be a jerk.”
The first two episodes of Shrinking Season 2 are streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes airing Wednesdays.