Review: Shrinking, "Boop" | Season 1, Episode 8
Gaby embraces the mess of her life while Jimmy learns to be aware of his own
Jessica Williams’ Gaby is probably the Shrinking character I’m most interested in. While I like Jason Segel’s central performance just fine, and seeing Harrison Ford embrace his comic timing amid dramatic stakes has been a delight, those characters are nothing new in their own right. The middle-aged man whose life is falling apart trying to balance his work and his grief? The stubborn senior confronting his own mortality and his responsibility to those in his life? We’re not really digging too deep into the well of character archetypes here.
Gaby, though, is messy. We meet her as Jimmy’s coworker, but our first introduction to her life is an insinuation she’s a cheater, before we quickly learn she’s divorcing her husband. At first, her divorce is a source of empowerment, but then she reveals her guilt about leaving an addict, and what damage it might cause. Her time with Liz and Alice has sketched out a clearer understanding of who Gaby was to Tia, and how she now fits …