Shrinking Part 1: Is Writing Like Therapy?

This episode, we're gonna be talking about Shrinking by Brett Goldstein, Bill Lawrence and Jason Segel. In Part 1 of this podcast, we’re going to be exploring the links between therapy and writing, the challenges of writing therapists as characters, as well as some helpful craft techniques from Shrinking that you can apply to your dialogue when writing challenging scenes. Then, in Part 2, we’re going to do a deep analysis of a scene from Shrinking that will teach you how to explode cliché in your own writing.   Shrinking was created and written by some of the same writers who brought us Ted Lasso, and if you've watched Shrinking, you know that there's a very familiar feeling Shrinking shares with Ted Lasso.  Recently, in my Thursday Night Writes class, I spoke about how there are shows that are therapeutic, and there are shows that are anti-therapeutic.  When I speak about a therapeutic show, what I'm really talking about is a show that is built around the healing of the main characters.  Shrinking and Ted Lasso are both therapeutic shows in their structure: shows that are built around journeys of healing for the main characters. In Ted Lasso, we meet a good man entering a complicated world. We watch him heal all the people around him in Season 1, and then in Season 2, we watch him deal with his own healing. That’s why it's a therapeutic show: the character's journey is a therapeutic journey. In watching a therapeutic journey, the value for us as an audience is that we get to feel some of that therapeutic journey ourselves. We get to think hmm, maybe I could become a better person, maybe I could deal with my demons, maybe I could grow…  Meanwhile, an anti-therapeutic show is a show that breaks the main characters. It may take a well-adjusted character and break them, or it may take a maladjusted character and break them even worse.  For example, Succession is an anti-therapeutic show: It is a show in which the characters do not transcend, but instead are swallowed by their experiences.  Believe it or not, an anti-therapeutic show like Succession or Bojack Horseman actually has the same effect on audiences as a therapeutic show like Shrinking or Ted Lasso. It creates what the ancient Greeks called catharsis: this feeling of not being alone in the world.  Anti-therapeutic shows can lessen our own pain by recognizing that other people have gone through similar pains to the ones that we've gone through.  So, most shows and movies are therapeutic for the audience, regardless of what happens to the characters.  Some shows are also therapeutic for the characters, while some are anti-therapeutic, and some are a mixture of the two.  Black Swan, for example, is both therapeutic and anti-therapeutic for the character.  We have a character who has a repressed dark side, and she takes the therapeutic action of integrating her dark side into herself. She can only dance the white swan, and in the movie she learns to dance the black swan.  But it's also anti-therapeutic in that the black swan in her ends up basically eating her.  So, she reaches this moment that's— like in all Darren Aronofsky movies– a transcendent suicide– where she both kills herself and says the word “perfect.”  She has both a therapeutic and anti-therapeutic journey at the same time. And the audience finds catharsis.  Shrinking, of course, is literally a therapeutic show in that the characters are therapists.  Harrison Ford's character, Paul, Jason Segel's character, Jimmy, and Jessica Williams’s character, Gaby, are all therapists.