Tag Archives: Lily Rabe

Shrinking: Season 2 – TV Review

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TL;DR – It is rare when a series can both genuinely make me laugh down to my core yet also deliver one of the most potent emotional slaps to the face that I have ever gotten.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the AppleTV+ service that viewed this series.

Warning – Contains scenes that may cause distress.

Shrinking. Image Credit: AppleTV+.

In today’s binge-streaming culture, it is almost expected that you will sit down and plough through a series in one or two sessions. Television that is almost just on in the background while you are doing other things. Well, today, we look at a series that respects you as a viewer in a way that you can’t watch all of it in one sitting because you need to savour every moment of it.

So, to set the scene, throughout Season One, Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) was trying to find his place in the world as he was still reeling from the tragic death of his wife Tia (Lilan Bowden) in a car crash years earlier. It was in this space that he decided to try a more hands-on type of therapy with his clients called ‘Jimmying’. There were success stories and failures, but it was working right up until one of Jimmy’s patients, Grace (Heidi Gardner), decided to take some advice a touch too literally and pushed her abusive boyfriend off a cliff. Meanwhile, Gaby (Jessica Williams) is dealing with always having to be the support mechanism for her family while starting a new role as professor, Sean (Luke Tennie) is working through having his dad back in his life, Alice (Lukita Maxwell) is still processing her own grief, and Paul’s (Harrison Ford) Parkinson’s is getting worse. Now, from here, we will be looking at the series as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.  

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Shrinking: Season 1 – TV Review

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TL;DR – This is a delightfully sad, yet also uplifting, series of broken people doing broken things, yet finding the strength to be better in each other.  

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the AppleTV+ service that viewed this series.

Paul on a couch reflecting on his life.

Shrinking Review –

Recently, there has been a running theme of there being a lot of good shows on AppleTV+ that absolutely no one is watching because the channel cannot seem to advertise anything that is not Ted Lasso. Now, while I have jammed with a lot of the sci-fi that they have, like Silo and Foundation, I think this would be an excellent time to see what else the service has to offer. The first stop in this exploration is a show that has been heavily recommended to me, and with that cast, I can understand why.  

So, to set the scene, it is late one night, like 3 a.m., and Liz (Christa Miller) and her husband Derek (Ted McGinley) are trying to work out who is going to go down and tell their neighbour Jimmy (Jason Segel) to turn off their music and stop making noise in the pool. Jimmy clearly looks to be an emotional mess who is trying to self-medicate via illicit substances and people you hire late at night for their professional services. That looks even worse in the morning when you see that disaster unfold with his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) ghosting him, there being no petrol in his car, and a bike that does not quite fit. The good thing is that it looks like Jimmy is going to therapy until you realise that he is the therapist.   

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Movie Review – Fractured

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TL;DR – While there is an interesting concept at play here, some clunky delivery stops it from being what it could have been    

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Fractured. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review –

I’m not a parent, but I can say with some certainty that having your child go missing would be one of the biggest fears that you could have. This is why it is so commonly used in film/tv/video games as a way to draw people in because it is a fear we all have and can quickly internalise. There have been some films that have used this technique to real aplomb and others that use it for a quick shorthand to get us to engage with the protagonist. Today we look at a film that tries to do both.

So to set the scene, Ray (Sam Worthington), his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe), and daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) are on the long drive home after a stressful thanksgiving meal at with Joanne’s family. Ray is a recovering alcoholic and Joanne’s dad kept asking him to have some wine, which leads to tension in the car on the way home. They pull over at a random roadside stop because Peri needed to use the toilet only for her to lose her little makeup container. As they search Peri gets spooked by a dog and falls into a construction pit. They rush her to the local ER and as a precaution they run a CAT scan to make sure there is no bleeding and that is the last time Ray saw his wife and daughter and no one knows where they went.

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