'Shrinking' Is Bill Lawrence's Best Show, and It Only Took Him 30 Years

Bill Lawrence has always given a genuine damn, and you could feel it in every episode of Scrubs — one of the genuinely great comedies of its era, and one I will defend until I am in the ground. I’ve watched it more times than I can count. I know every Snow Patrol cue. I have opinions about the janitor. I know that Hooch really IS crazy.

But rewatching it now, with some distance, you can also see Lawrence still working something out. The bro energy — the insult-as-affection, the deflection, the J.D./Turk bromance as both the show’s beating heart and its most convenient hiding place — had a ceiling. Every time Scrubs earned a genuinely devastating moment, and it earned several, it would glance around nervously and reach for the nearest joke. The humor and the heart were taking turns. They weren’t the same thing yet. Hence its reputation for “whiplash poignancy.”

The clearest evidence of that tension was Cox. The two best episodes Scrubs ever produced — “My Screw Up” and “My Lunch” — worked precisely because they cracked Cox open in ways the show rarely allowed. Genuinely heartbreaking, and devastating specifically because Cox’s vulnerability felt so uncommon. But the show couldn’t hold it. Next episode, he’d snap back. The armor would return. Those moments were events, not evolution. I love them. That’s still a limitation.

I recognize the dynamic. This site started as “Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People.” Mean-spirited misanthropy was the brand. Then life happened — marriage, kids, loss, the accumulated weight of actually giving a sh** about things — and the calculus shifted. The scathing reviews didn’t disappear, but they stopped being the only note available. Lawrence went through something similar. He got married, had kids, fell into the particular helplessness of being a husband completely obsessed with his wife and a father drowning in the goo of raising children. That’s not a put on for Shrinking. That’s a man who lived something and couldn’t keep it out of his work.

What’s easy to forget, in the shadow of Ted Lasso, is that Lawrence started figuring this out a full decade earlier with Cougar Town. He took a premise engineered to be condescending — a divorced woman in her forties panicking about desirability, with a terrible title that announced its contempt before the pilot even aired — and built something almost entirely opposite. I don’t think it was even intentional. It started as one show and he found his way to another. Cougar Town was warm, weird, and genuinely female-centered, and it gave Lawrence his first real playground for the thing he’d been reaching toward since Scrubs: a comedy where the humor didn’t have to apologize for the feeling. He just wasn’t quite brave enough yet to let his male characters fully wear it.

Ted Lasso deserves a brief accounting, mostly to set the record straight. Lawrence built the template, it worked, and then he stepped back. The seasons that eventually buckled under the weight of their own aggressive warmth — the ones that turned a meaningful portion of the audience against a show they’d once loved — happened largely under Sudeikis. Lawrence had already moved on to build the thing Lasso was pointing toward.

Which brings us to Shrinking, and to what Lawrence has finally, fully figured out. The humor in this show isn’t comic relief. It isn’t a pressure valve. It isn’t what the show does when the emotion gets too big. It holds up the emotion. The two finally co-exist.

And nowhere is that clearer than in Paul, who is basically what Dr. Cox always had the potential to become. The difference isn’t that Paul is softer, exactly. It’s that his vulnerability accumulates rather than resets. Cox’s emotional moments were events. Paul’s are chapters. Over three seasons, we’ve watched him carry each cracked-open moment forward into the next one, softening incrementally without ever surrendering the gruff identity that makes him Paul. He’s still withering. He’s just also been quietly directing his warmth at everyone around him — at Gaby, at Alice, at Sean, at Julie — everywhere, it sometimes seemed, except directly at Jimmy. Which is what made the season 3 finale so goddamn powerful. Paul flying back unannounced, telling Jimmy he’s more of a son than a burden, sending him toward Sofi with a classic Indiana Jones callback — “choose wisely” — wasn’t a character transformation. It was a redirection. The warmth was always there. Jimmy finally got to stand in it.

If you weren’t a goddamn puddle on the floor, I’d check your soul.

Lawrence has always had a big heart. Shrinking is what happened when he stopped being embarrassed about it — when the bro humor and the emotional ambition and the wisdom of a man who loves his family a little ridiculously all finally occupy the same space at the same time. Thirty years to make it look easy. Worth every goddamn one of them.