Shows Like Shrinking
Jimmy is struggling to grieve the loss of his wife while being a dad, friend, and therapist. He decides to try a new approach with everyone in his path: unfiltered, brutal honesty. Will it make things better—or unleash uproarious chaos?
Ranked by shared creators, cast, themes, genre, and network — not just generic recommendations.
Ted Lasso
Same creators (Bill Lawrence + Brett Goldstein), same Apple TV+ warm ensemble dramedy DNA — direct franchise sibling.
Dispatches from Elsewhere
Created by and starring Jason Segel — direct creator/star link, same introspective dramedy sensibility.
After Life
Grieving widower uses brutal unfiltered honesty as coping — nearly identical premise, grief + dark comedy dramedy.
Dead to Me
Grief-driven dark comedy dramedy, emotional rawness balanced with warmth — same tone and serialized audience.
The Kominsky Method
Mentor-mentee male friendship, therapy-adjacent, warm dramedy about aging, grief, and finding meaning.
Fleabag
Grief processed through dark wit; prestige dramedy audience overlap; therapy-adjacent emotional honesty.
Loudermilk
Counselor protagonist with bad attitude as coping mechanism, recovery + dark comedy — strong thematic twin.
Better Things
Single parent navigating grief and chaos with raw honesty; Pamela Adlon's warm-rough dramedy tone mirrors Shrinking perfectly.
Parenthood
Family dramedy with therapy arcs, father-daughter grief storylines, serialized emotional beats — canonical broadcast peer.
Trying
Apple TV+ warm comedy-drama, earnest emotional core, ensemble found-family — same platform and tonal register as Shrinking.
Russian Doll
Death and grief processed through dark comedy; philosophical dramedy with prestige streaming audience overlap.
Six Feet Under
Grief and death as central lens, dysfunctional family dark comedy, serialized prestige drama — foundational shelf entry.
The Big C
Terminal diagnosis played as gallows-humor dramedy; same 'finding joy amid mortality' emotional beat.
Horace and Pete
Dark character comedy about dysfunction and loss; tonally heavier but shares the emotionally honest dramedy shelf.
Men of a Certain Age
Male midlife friendship dramedy with grief-adjacent emotional register; Ray Romano's earnest underplaying echoes Segel.
Catastrophe
Sharon Horgan/Rob Delaney messy-adult dark comedy with grief episode; warm irreverence, same prestige dramedy crowd.
BEEF
Prestige dark comedy about emotional damage and unresolved trauma; same streaming-era dramedy audience, different premise.
Mom
Recovery, dysfunction, mother-child relationship played as comedy-drama; overlapping audience despite multi-cam format.
Ginny & Georgia
Parent-child dramedy with grief subplot and warm ensemble; lighter tone but shared audience via Netflix algorithm.
Santa Clarita Diet
Dark comedy about family navigating an absurd crisis with warmth; tonal cousin via ensemble family + dark comedy blend.
How Good Is Shrinking?
Ratings across IMDb and TMDB, plus our verdict.
Where to Watch Shrinking
Streaming, rental, and purchase options across 40+ countries.
United States
USStream
2
Apple TV
Apple TV Amazon ChannelAvailable in 85 countries
Frequently asked about Shrinking
Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.
Why does Jimmy start ignoring therapy boundaries and telling patients exactly what he thinks?
Jimmy is still in the raw, chaotic phase of grieving his wife Tia, who died in a car accident about a year before the show begins. Overwhelmed and reckless, he decides conventional therapy is too slow and begins giving blunt, directive advice — essentially projecting his own need for someone to cut through his pain onto his patients. His colleague Gaby and mentor Paul repeatedly warn him that this approach is unethical, but Jimmy believes he is genuinely helping people move faster than traditional methods allow.
What is Paul's Parkinson's diagnosis doing to his arc, and why does he keep it secret for so long?
Paul was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease before the series starts but hides it from nearly everyone, including his colleagues, because his identity is so tightly bound to being competent and in control. His estrangement from his daughter Meg means he has no close family to lean on, so secrecy becomes a way of avoiding vulnerability. When the diagnosis does come out, it forces Paul to confront both his mortality and his emotional isolation, and it becomes the catalyst for him repairing his relationship with Meg.
Why does Jimmy's patient Sean move into his house, and is that ethically justified within the show?
Jimmy invites Sean, a veteran struggling with anger and PTSD, to live with him after Sean has nowhere stable to go — an extreme extension of his boundary-breaking therapy philosophy. The show acknowledges this is ethically indefensible by professional standards; Paul and Gaby treat it as a serious lapse in judgment. Within the narrative it works as a story device because Sean's presence forces Jimmy to practice the stability and routine he preaches, and their household dynamic becomes a surrogate family that helps both men heal.
What happened to Jimmy and Tia's marriage before she died, and does the show reveal whether they were in a good place?
The show gradually discloses through flashbacks and Jimmy's conversations with their daughter Alice that Jimmy and Tia's marriage had become strained — Jimmy had emotionally checked out and was not fully present in the relationship in the period before her death. This guilt is a central source of Jimmy's grief: he is not just mourning her loss but mourning the version of himself that failed to show up for her. The ambiguity is intentional; the show never renders a clean verdict, leaving Jimmy (and the audience) to sit with the unresolved regret.
How does Alice's behavior in Season 1 reflect her grief differently from Jimmy's?
While Jimmy responds to Tia's death with chaos and self-destruction, Alice suppresses her grief and takes on a hyper-competent, adult-like role — essentially parenting her own father. She channels her pain into practicality and forward momentum, which reads as functional but masks how much she has never been allowed to simply be a grieving teenager. Her friendship with neighbor Liz and her eventual emotional breakdowns signal that her coping is a delayed-fuse version of the same unprocessed loss Jimmy is acting out more visibly.