'Shrinking' season 2 review – Harrison Ford's endearing comedy is a wonderfully light TV series | TV

WWith so many shows on so many streaming platforms, anything can be canceled after a single season. To avoid that, you have to have a great idea, know exactly why it's good, and communicate that to your audience from the start? Not always: When Shrinking debuted on Apple TV+ last year, it did none of these things and seemed ripe for cancellation. But here it is still, and it is most welcome back.

A lot of work had to be done in the first season to overcome the series' terrible premise. Jimmy (Jason Segel) is a Los Angeles therapist who is surprised by the death of his wife, a catastrophe that causes him to lose patience with his patients. Psychiatrists are supposed to sit impassively, dishing out dry observations and asking probing questions before announcing that the hour is up. At this point, expect them to forget your existence until the same time next week. Instead, Jimmy intervenes in his clients' lives by speaking openly and offering spontaneous advice. The first season began with Jimmy letting Sean (Luke Tennie), a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, move in with him; The second season begins with him visiting Grace (Heidi Gardner) in prison for literally accepting his proposal to push her abusive husband off a cliff.

As Segel, Jimmy is a gallivanting man-child whose colleagues, neighbors and teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) forgive his constant blunders because he is well-meaning, open-minded and dependent on their help as he lives with loss. As the first season progressed, the show's writers realized that this alone would make a better show than the “therapist goes villain” idea. Jimmy's unreliable emotional intelligence makes him an acceptable protagonist in a funny drama about a group of friends dealing with the death of one of their friends, but he's not at all credible as a therapist, whether he's in crisis or not. It's hard to imagine he'll ever pass the training, and if his questionable methods have serious consequences, it'll be a shock.

Luckily, that's becoming less and less common, as Shrinking has become something we all need in our streaming show lineup: an ensemble piece full of people just like us, but a touch smarter, funnier, and more outspoken. It's important to have a non-essential hangout show that you can fall back on when you don't need to deal with anything more difficult.

This allows us to spend more time with Paul (Harrison Ford), Jimmy's professional mentor whose grumpy core hides a soft core, and Gaby (Jessica Williams), his newly divorced colleague. We see more of his older neighbors Liz (Christa Miller) and Derek (Ted McGinley) because the showrunners responded to the positive reaction from fans and gave them more work. Liz is a frightening but brittle straight-talker who is held up high by her laid-back, joking husband, and their relationship is a wonderful thing.

The main new storylines are that Gaby, who was best friends with Jimmy's late wife, is now sleeping with Jimmy and has realized that her initial assessment of him as a “safe cock” – a source of good, casual sex that doesn't come through commitment is burdened – wrong because she falls in love with him. Meanwhile, the drunk driver responsible for Jimmy's wife's death has emerged and wants to speak to the family and repent. This guy is played by series co-creator Brett Goldstein, aka Roy Kent from Ted Lasso – both series have the same trick of compensating for the actually fatal structural problems with lovable characters and an overwhelming selection of funny lines.

A few such knick-knacks: Derek responds to Liz receiving good news with “She hasn't been this excited since she got us separate blankets!”; Jimmy's feisty lawyer friend Brian (Michael Urie) overdoes it when he tries to boost Grace's self-esteem during a prison visit (“There she is! Gorgeous! There's something about your skin tone and a bright neon light that creates magic… Orange is the new thing. “ snack!”); and Liz deduces that Gaby is once again sneaking over to Jimmy's house to have sex even though she promised not to because “You said you were going to stay home and air fry some tilapia,” an excuse, which is too concrete to be true.

The friendship between Gaby and Liz, which bridges the generation gap through cutting honesty and gleeful exchanges – their exchanges about the erotic power of pine scents will make you spit out your tea in shocked delight – is shrinking in its essence. Here's a group of buddies who are comfortable saying what's on their mind, even if it's saying it to each other when they're being stupid, which usually means telling Jimmy. First his wife died and now he's the least interesting character in his own series, but that's okay – he has his friends to help him through it.