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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
40
Mixed:
15
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
Jan 21, 2026
Season 3 Review:
From witty one-liners and endearingly exaggerated personalities to physical comedy, musical numbers, and more it bears repeating that Shrinking is very funny and never maudlin. The series excels at giving viewers emotional whiplash (complimentary), but the team hasn’t just mastered the art of flicking from poignant to playful scenes on a dime.
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Oct 15, 2024
Mar 6, 2023
Season 1 Review:
With no sense of exaggeration intended, this show consistently hits it out of park, offering up characters who admit their flaws, embrace their foibles, and ultimately improve as a result. This might all sound a little bit safe for some, but have faith, because very soon Shrinking will be picking up Emmy awards – remember where you heard it first.
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Jan 26, 2023
Season 1 Review:
The writers do an amazing job of pinging back and forth between various characters and their relationships on a level rarely seen in a TV comedy. ... You never know what goes on behind the scenes, but one gets the feeling Ford is having one hell of a great time on this show. We’re sure having a hell of a great time watching it.
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Jan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Judging by the first six episodes sent out to critics for review, Apple TV+’s first 2023 comedy kicks off the year with a helluva bang. The well-balanced dose of sarcastic and contagious humor (rooted in pain and heartache) is the kind of prescribed laughter we need to heal our souls after a long and hard day.
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Jan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
By the second episode it's gelled into an easygoing hangout comedy filled with charming characters who are, by almost any measure, way too involved in each others' lives but also seem incapable of living without one another. ... This is very much an ensemble series that gives the rest of the cast plenty of welcome room in the spotlight, with Williams and Ford effectively playing co-leads.
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Oct 15, 2024
Season 2 Review:
So far, the biggest problem with Shrinking season 2 is how much time it devotes to the Jimmy-Gabby situationship. .... Otherwise, the new episodes deliver plenty of the dynamics that worked so well in season 1: Gaby and Liz’s deepening friendship, based on truth-telling and making fun of Jimmy; Paul and Jimmy’s reason-versus-emotion antics; and Ted McGinley — as Liz’s affably Zen husband, Derek — with anybody.
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RogerEbert.comOct 15, 2024
Season 2 Review:
“Shrinking” has a habit of getting a bit too overwritten, sometimes verging on soap opera in its narrative twists and turns, but I’ve either gotten used to it or come to like these characters enough not to care anymore. The humor is sharper this year; the emotion lands harder.
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ColliderOct 15, 2024
Season 2 Review:
The jokes are the fleece that lines that trauma blanket to keep us warm, but the emotional depth is the stitches and seams that hold everything together. All of that comes together for one of the best series on TV — even though, like its characters, it’s not without its flaws.
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RogerEbert.comJan 26, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Episode by episode, it's notable how "Shrinking" isn’t rushing to get anywhere. But the characters are so strong, with the plotting always keeping their dysfunctional relationships in flux, that the series works as a hangout in which you care most about everyone’s honesty with themselves and others.
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Jan 24, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Given the richness of the casting, it’s also hard to imagine the show going beyond its first season, though there are many reasons you wish it would. ... Everyone comes off as authentically human, save perhaps for Jimmy. But he’s a work in progress, with an entourage of endearing role models showing him how to be real.
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Jan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
If the show does start to lose you, it won’t be for long. (Unless, perhaps, you’re a real therapist.) Breezy episodes and clever writing ripe with undeniable jokes and razor-sharp relatability help anchor Shrinking‘s effective execution. But its greatest strength lies in a charming cast with excellent chemistry and characters you can’t help but root for.
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Jan 27, 2023
Season 1 Review:
In a way, the series has a good deal in common with “Ted Lasso,” in the sense that it succeeds not because of its premise – which sounds completely ordinary and familiar – but in spite of it. “Shrinking” isn’t a big idea, but with a big heart and genuine laughs, it, too, achieves its goal.
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The PlaylistJan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
At its best, “Shrinking” is a show about how decisions have unexpected ripple effects. One doctor decides to go off-book and that pushes his friends and colleagues to take leaps that they may not have otherwise considered. That’s an easily watchable concept. It treads water a bit too much in the middle of the season after its set-up has kind of drifted away and the writers are content to just bounce the now-established characters off each other, but this is also the section of the first season in which it feels the ensemble starts to gel.
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The GuardianJan 28, 2026
The TelegraphJan 28, 2026
Season 3 Review:
Harrison Ford, of all people, should never have to say a line like, “You’re afraid to move forward, but you know you should,” as the coffee-shop dad-rock swells up in the background and we all walk away better people. And yet… it’s still very funny, uniformly well put together and full of great turns.
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The TelegraphOct 15, 2024
Season 2 Review:
It’s less reliant on the big two of Segel and Ford, bringing in Lasso’s Brett Goldstein (also a writer on this show) in a surprising role as Segel’s new antagonist. It works up to a point but to this gnarled old churl there’s still too much growing and learning going on, and all among wealthy people with Elle Deco lives.
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The GuardianJan 27, 2023
Season 1 Review:
[Harrison Ford's] dry delivery of Paul’s acerbic one-liners and verdicts on his younger colleagues’ antics provides a much-needed counterpoint to the schmaltz that often threatens to overwhelm, and his gravitas grounds a show whose fluffy pieces could otherwise easily float away.
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Jan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Ford seems poorly used and out-of-place in this comic milieu; that he’s stiff and uncomfortable is a joke with diminishing returns. Better are his dramatic scenes. ... Whereas Segel is more at sea. An open-hearted performer whose emotional palette is big, bold and easy to read, Segel cannot make Jimmy’s confessions feel special or earned. ... With that in mind, I enjoyed Jimmy’s relationship with Gaby, as the pair of therapists’ chemistry seems to exist beyond words. And his relationship with his daughter Alice, too, felt pleasingly underexplored.
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The PlaylistOct 15, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Unfortunately, it’s rinse-and-repeat for season two. The adage “If it ain’t broke” has never rung more accurately than it does here. .... It’s not all bad. Damon Wayans Jr. has joined the chat as a love interest of Gaby, teetering between his usual persona and an avalanche of dad jokes. The humor overall sees noticeable improvement with each episode.
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Jan 30, 2023
Season 1 Review:
When you put Harrison Ford in full curmudgeon mode next to Jason Segel and Jessica Williams, there’s just not denying that you’ve got a competently funny show on your hands. But what is it saying? I mean, other than the platitudes it seems to spout: that all of us (even therapists!) are struggling? That we’re all doing our best?
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Jan 26, 2023
Season 1 Review:
It’s tempting to just keep talking about Harrison Ford, because aside from Paul, the news about “Shrinking” isn’t so good. ... The cycle of yelling, crying and apologizing is so constant that even within episodes you lose track of what people are yelling about and what they’re apologizing for. Tonally, however, the show is a quiet, somewhat monochrome drama, and the result is that it never quite feels in sync.
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Jan 26, 2023
Jan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Segel, Goldstein, and Lawrence try to frame Jimmy as relatably flawed. Instead, he comes off as a casual perpetrator of gross therapeutic malpractice whose negligence as the sole remaining parent to a girl suffering acutely from her own grief constitutes an ongoing emergency. The result is a show that labors mightily to affect and inspire but ultimately only grates. And its construction is even flimsier than its content. Plot holes are common.
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The Daily BeastJan 23, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Boasting grating turns from its overdoing-it cast, scripts that are like nails on a chalkboard, and the participation of Harrison Ford in a role, and project, that’s beneath him, it’s the nadir of “high concept” comedy. ... Still, Ford is better than Shrinking, and so too are most other comedies currently on the air.
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