In his long and storied career, one thing Harrison Ford has not done much of is television. In fact, he hasn’t done any TV since Star Wars made him a Movie Star—except for an appearance on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles—but before he hit it big, when he was a gigging actor/carpenter, he appeared on shows like Mod Squad and Gunsmoke and Kung Fu. Since the wall between film and TV came down over the last decade, though, he has resisted the prestige wave, even as television has primarily become the home of character-driven cinema. Until now, that is. Ford is joining Jason Segel in the upcoming Apple TV+ series Shrinking, a new comedy from the Ted Lasso team of Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, aka Roy Kent.
While I would LOVE to see Harrison “Grumpy Gus” Ford appear on Ted Lasso just to watch him and Roy Kent have a mean-off, Shrinking will have to do. Segel will star as a grieving therapist who starts telling too much truth to his patients, which leads to huge changes in his and everyone else’s lives. Ford will star as a fellow therapist who mentors Segel’s character and is grappling with his own problems, chiefly a Parkinson’s diagnosis. And this is…a comedy?
If anyone has earned the benefit of the doubt, it’s Bill Lawrence, Brett Goldstein, and Jason Segel, whose most recent writing credit is the Netflix pandemic thriller, Windfall, but of course he also wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets. “Sad therapists making ethical violations and/or dealing with degenerative disease” is a dark premise for a comedy, but wait and see, I suppose. At least there’s no way this could be worse than the nadir of Harrison Ford’s television career, The Star Wars Holiday Special. It’s really only up from there.
Attached - Jason Segel out in Ojai yesterday.
