Have we entered the age of 'theramedy' with the shows we watch?

A still from 'Shrinking', Apple TV’s ongoing dramedy about shrinks and the limitations of the hallowed therapy couch.

Jason Segel’s Jimmy, one of the leads in Shrinking, Apple TV’s ongoing dramedy about shrinks and the limitations of the hallowed therapy couch — let’s call it “theramedy” — turns into a “psychological vigilante”. A grieving therapist starts to break the rules by telling patients exactly what he thinks. He gives a long-term client an ultimatum: Leave your exploitative, nitwit husband or I am not your shrink any more. He takes the anger management of another of his clients, a black man with a violent past as a soldier in Afghanistan and whose PTSD-addled brain makes him angry at everyone and everything he encounters, off the couch and into a public Rage Room. Jimmy doesn’t stop the vigilantism at that. The angry man, already on the path of healing through Jimmy’s unconventional methods, moves in with him and his teenaged daughter Alice (Lucite Maxwell). Jimmy is a recent widower and both he and Alice are navigating the maze of anger and resentment that follows the grief of losing a loved one. With his unusual — and “unethical”, the show is far too willing to point out through the characters of Jimmy’s mentor Paul (Harrison Ford) and Gaby (Jessica Williams), a woke wellness junkie colleague and best friend of his dead wife.

Created for Apple TV by Segel and the duo that created the platform’s most successful series Ted Lasso (the new season of which drops on March 15), Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, Shrinking is a therapist comedy and an all-round tom-tomming of the idea that until we have it in us to confront the worst within us, sunk comfortably on a shrink’s couch, we have hopes in hell to be human, let alone heroic.

The self-care, self-heal zeitgeist that have gained currency in the last few years, and which accompanies the return to normalcy after the pandemic years, ought to have spilled on to the shows that we stream on our devices. Human dramas coming our of big and small Hollywood studios, are less about characters in conflict with the external world, and more about conflict within themselves and how they address their flaws and trauma-informed selves. The self-corrected path is the journey, and the one who dares to know oneself is the heroic character. Most of these characters risk being cancelled if they don’t fix their “toxic” or “enmeshed” or “self-sabotaged” selves. There’s no happy endings in these stories, only hopeful beginnings — imitative, of course, of life.

Hilariously bad therapists in scripted series can be part of the fun. Apple TV is known for quality over quantity and rigour of storytelling. Apple TV also released The Shrink Next Door last year, with two powerhouse performances at its centre: Marty, a lonely, people-pleasing, squeamish and fearful Jewish laundry-owner Marty (Will Ferrell) and his therapist Herschkopf (Paul Rudd), who, by helping him, takes over Marty’s life.  The Spanish series on Amazon Prime, When You Least Expect It (2022) is about strangers in group therapy who collectively work to overcome their grief. The Turkish Netflix series Another Self (2022), Seasons 2 and 3 of which have already been greenlit, is about three friends who arrive in a seaside town and connect with their spiritual selves and suddenly face unresolved generational trauma. The mom-and-pop baggage spill on children are no longer stuff of just comedy or to be taken lightly. The parents are the likely villains in most characters’ trajectories.

A still from the Netflix documentary 'Stutz'.

Documentaries aren’t behind to capitalise on this moment. Among recent ones, is Digital Addiction (2022) on Vudu, in which experts help families confront their addictions and try to find a path to recovery. Correcting sexual repression and malaise have informed self-healing reality shows such as Sex, Love and Goop (2021) on Netflix. A brilliant, candid-camera style exploration of the dynamic that can form between therapist and patient is Stutz (2023), again on Netflix, in which actor Jonah Hill sits in conversation with his own therapist, the legendary New York shrink Phil Stutz, to reveal tools that helped Hill deal with his emotional malignancies. Therapy is work in progress, the show rightly suggests. Gypsy (2017), another Netflix show, had Naomi Watts play a therapist who has the perilous tendency of developing intimate relationships with people in her patients’ lives.

Hopeful beginnings are here to stay in OTT stories.  It’s a matter of time before Indian streaming content takes the leap from portraying mental health to making the inner journey of characters drive the plot — from identifying an emotional wound to its catharsis. In India, the OTT universe is exploding and like the rest of the world, the politics of representation — be it illness of any kind, or the sexuality and gender spectrum — is high on the priority of screenwriting. Technology is finding new ways to reach audiences. And yet, Indian television shows that treat mental illness with sensitivity and realism are rare. Unlike shows coming out of the US, like, say, BoJack Horseman in which the eponymous protagonist suffers from self-destructive addictions. The show however makes it clear, in the compelling way the character has been written for animation, that his behaviour isn’t simply because of alcohol abuse, but because of neglectful and abusive parenting. Marvel’s Jessica Jones is a perspective on how severely debilitating and complex post-traumatic stress can be. The screen adaptation of The New York Times’ Modern Love blog 'Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am' by entertainment lawyer Terri Cheney, in which she came out as bipolar, had Anne Hathaway in her role in the first Modern Love anthology on Amazon Prime. This episode distills the myth that people with mental illness are defined by their condition — Hathaway’s character is as glamorous and successful as she is moody and dysfunctional.

The shrink really made her first fully amplified debut in American television was Dr Jennifer Melfi played by Lorraine Bracco in HBO’s The Sopranos (1999-2007), the most robust and humanising  television series about the burden of the hitman. In the fifth and penultimate season, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) quits therapy, but in the first episode, when Tony sits in a psychiatrist's waiting room, about to embark on what could be a transformative journey, is a key pop culture moment. It encapsulated the promise that even on a ruthless gangster, whose life rests on betrayal, lies and murder, therapy could be transformative. Tony’s relationship with Dr Melfi is central to the show. On most days, Tony sits silent and exasperated at Dr Melfi's office week after week, with long, boring stretches when nothing really happens — it doesn’t get more real than that. Therapy is neither hero nor villain, just a part of life that can often move very little but is unavoidable.

A still from the 1999 TV show 'The Sopranos'.

Is is obvious by the end of Season 5 that Tony is unable to, and certainly unwilling to reform, and that’s one of the things that kept The Sopranos so real. If anything, therapy has given Tony enough self-knowledge to know this: “All this fucking self-knowledge. What the fuck has it gotten me?” This irresolute, faltering self-journey is still the most clutter-cutting portrayal of the power of the shrink in entertainment.