There are so many lessons a viewer could and should take away from a show like Apple TV+’s Shrinking. The series centers on a group of therapists, their close friends, and their family. It is a show about mental health and how we navigate—and sometimes struggle to survive—trauma. Soak it all up! It’s good for you!
Yet I’m not sure if the part of the series that I’ve decided to incorporate into my life ranks among the its most valuable tools for coping with the world: Every time Michael Urie’s character, Brian, walks into a room, he announces himself by trumpeting, “Ba-ba-bummm!” Yes, like he’s being heralded in medieval times. I want to start doing the same.
The flamboyance and fanfare is appealing. Why not demand that people’s attention should be paid to you because of your very presence, whenever you enter a space? You deserve to be that exalted. There’s a confidence to the action that pairs nicely with a made-up song that Brian used to sing in the show— “Everything Always Goes My Way”—when things would…well, inevitably go his way.
In Shrinking, as in life for the rest of us, it turns out that things don’t always go Brian’s way.
That trumpet blare can fizzle to a defeated squawk sometimes.
In Season 2 of Shrinking, which launched Wednesday, Brian works through whether or not he wants kids now that he and his husband, Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), are newlyweds. He struggles through a rift in his best friendship with Jimmy (Jason Segel), after mutual betrayals, and he works exasperatedly to have Harrison Ford’s oh-so-intimidating client, Paul, take him seriously.
Demanding dignity through those setbacks is as important as commanding adulation—with or without a song. It’s a sign of emotional maturity, of growing up.
That’s something that Urie feels keenly at this point in his career. “I finally feel like I’m wearing my big boy pants and doing prestige television,” he tells me.
Well, at least for now, those “big boy pants” are as metaphorical as they are literal.
Urie burst onto the scene with his role as Marc St. James, the snarky gay assistant to Vanessa Williams’ fabulous magazine editor on Ugly Betty. He’s spent his career traversing between stage and screen: roles on Broadway in shows like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Spamalot, and on TV in hits like Modern Family, The Good Wife, and Younger.
Currently, eight times a week, those big boy pants are actually stretchy tights, as he plays the endearingly daffy Prince Dauntless in Broadway’s Once Upon a Mattress, which he’s performing at night while promoting Shrinking Season 2 during the day.
“I’m sort of chasing naps all the time,” he says, laughing. “But it’s the dream. I get to talk about the TV show I’m on, and then go do a musical and make people happy.”
Season 1 of Shrinking began by dropping viewers directly into grief.
Jimmy (Segel) is a therapist whose wife and the mother of his teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), was killed by a drunk driver. He absconds all professional and personal responsibilities, a belly flop into rock bottom that includes neglecting his daughter, giving terrible advice to clients, and ghosting Brian, his lifelong best friend who keeps trying to help him.
But Shrinking was co-created by Segel, Bill Lawrence, and Brett Goldstein. Lawrence and Goldstein worked on three seasons of Ted Lasso together, where Goldstein was a writer in addition to playing lovable curmudgeon Roy Kent. Lawrence’s TV résumé also includes Scrubs and Cougar Town. If you’re familiar with those series, it shouldn’t have been a surprise how deftly Shrinking injects the outrageous humor of everyday life and its gregarious, off-kilter personalities into a story about community and healing.
“If I get one scene and a couple of jokes every episode, I’m happy,” Urie says. “They have exceeded my expectations over and over again this season with the storylines, pushing Brian to grow and change. I think that’s given me hilarious stuff and heartbreaking stuff.”
Given how jittery Brian was about taking the plunge into marriage in Season 1, Urie wondered whether in Season 2 his character would enjoy married life, or “freak out being married to someone who’s stable and confident and easygoing, when Brian is such a neurotic basket case.”
He suspected that Brian and Jimmy’s fractured relationship would be explored this season, but admits that the places the show goes, he “did not see coming.”
Though the pair reconnected during Season 1, rekindling the dynamic they had when they became friends in college, Brian is rocked when he discovers that Jimmy has been harboring a secret from him. It makes him feel dismissed, especially when he catches onto other symptoms of a relationship that has deteriorated, like when he realizes that Jimmy, his supposed best friend who officiated his wedding, doesn’t even know what his husband does for a living.
The scenes are relatable; who among us hasn’t forgotten that a friend’s partner was…I want to say…a consultant???
They also illuminate new territory when it comes to male friendship on TV, something that’s prototypically given a familiar hetero, macho “buddies” or “bros” portrayal, which is upended by Shrinking’s rare straight-male/gay-male depiction of that duo—one that’s also honest about how close relationships change and strain, regardless of sexuality, during adulthood.
“I do have straight male best friends, and that relationship did have to evolve when I came out. They were the ones that bridged that gap, like Jimmy and Brian,” Urie says. “Jimmy and Brian became friends in college when Brian was closeted and living his life as a straight man. Then he came out. The relationship survived it, and they remained best friends. It’s only now, many, many years later, when Brian grows up and lets go of this ‘everything goes my way’ disposition, and realizes that life is harder than that.”
There’s such a kernel of truth in that, one that’s rarely explored, at least meaningfully, in pop culture.
“That’s a real thing. When we come out of the closet, sometimes we come out guns blazing, and say, ‘Life is great now!’ But it doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t still mountains to climb and hurdles to hurdle,” he says.
When Brian realizes that Jimmy isn’t acting like a best friend the way he should anymore, he confronts him and says, “If we met today, would we even be friends?”
“I’ve never seen that,” Urie says. “I’ve never seen that sentiment explored on television, and I was so glad we did that. I think that’s probably something that a lot of people deal with and haven’t had shown to them. And what better show than a show about mental health to do that?”
Throughout Urie’s vibrant career, especially on TV where roles have popped off like fireworks on the long-running sitcoms on which he made memorable impressions, there’s a pattern.
On Ugly Betty, Marc St. James was a snide (brilliant) gay whose presence helped, sometimes via bullying, a main character’s progress. On Younger, Redmond was a snide (brilliant) gay whose presence helped, sometimes via bullying, a main character’s progress. On Modern Family, Gavin Sinclair was a snide (brilliant) gay whose presence helped, sometimes via bullying, a main character’s progress.
Urie’s career spans far more than one type, as unparalleled as he is at bringing that type a full palette of spice and pathos. Look at his work on TV in Netflix’s first gay Christmas rom-com Single All the Way, or on stage in his exceptional work in Angels in America or Buyer and Cellar for proof of that. But he has been struck by the impact his character in Shrinking has had, on viewers, critics, and even himself.
“He’s definitely closer to me than anybody else I’ve played on TV,” Urie says about Brian.
When you watch Shrinking, Brian is still a sidekick character, the way Urie has reliably played on TV. Currently on Broadway each night in Once Upon a Mattress, he’s a romantic lead, but his (expertly) goofy character is a bit of a (brilliant) second banana there, too, even in a standard musical theater love plot.
A friend of Urie’s who is a talent manager recently told him that, after Shrinking and Mattress, he needs to play an “evil” character.
“I was like, you know, I used to just play only mean people,” Urie says. “On Ugly Betty and Younger and Modern Family, those were all really mean characters.” We look at each other and do the shared gay raised eyebrow and subtle headnod thing of realization. (If you know, you know.)
The friend told him, “Well, that’s how gay used to be on TV.”
It was an epiphany moment.
“Oh, my God, it’s so interesting that snark was so easy to take from a gay guy in those years, when I was doing those shows,” Urie says. “I mean, it was fun. It was great writing. It’s fun to be snarky. But that shade of character is, I think, a bit of a thing of the past. And should be, rightfully so. We don’t have to make all gay characters evil.”
Enter Shrinking, and schedule a fitting for Urie’s “big boy pants.”
“It’s kind of a relief. I don’t mind playing the nice guy for a little while,” he says. “Yeah, it’s fun to be mean. I think he was saying more, like, ‘You need to do something serious and with major gravitas.’ But I was like, ‘I’m actually pretty happy in this sweet person era.”
Cue the trumpet for his entrance: Ba-ba-bummm!
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