‘Shrinking’ Co-Creator Bill Lawrence Breaks Down Season 2 Ending, Thanksgiving Montage And Season 3 Theme

SPOILER ALERT: This piece spoils the finale of Shrinking Season 2.

Santa came early this year. All of Shrinking Season 2 is now available to stream on Apple TV+ with the finale launching on Christmas Eve Eve ahead of its scheduled Christmas Day arrival.

Though Jimmy (Jason Segel) and company celebrated Thanksgiving in the Season 2 finale, titled “The Last Thanksgiving,” many of the last moments for the comedy ensemble can be seen as Christmas gifts — with Gaby (Jessica Williams) reuniting with both Derrick #2 (Damon Wayans Jr.) AND her mom (Vernée Watson), Brian (Michael Urie) and Charlie (Devin Kawaoka) getting a call from Ava (Claudia Sulewski) about adopting her baby and Jimmy getting a special rock from Liz (Christa Miller). Louis (Brett Goldstein) also got a moment of more genuine forgiveness from Jimmy at the train station in the final moments of Episode 12. For other characters like Harrison Ford’s Paul, the path forward might be more bumpy ahead of Season 3, but like the beloved Batman-esque therapist says, he has people to lean on when the going gets tough.

Shrinking co-creator Bill Lawrence, who directed the finale episode, shared that the smaller moments during the Thanksgiving montage were his favorite to film in Episode 12.

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“I was able to cut corners a little bit and say, ‘Hey, we’ll shoot lots of random moments in the Thanksgiving to cut with Louis at the train station.’ And seeing that Christa and Lukita came up with what their rock dance would be was really fun and cute,” Lawrence told Deadline. “To see Ted McGinley say, ‘I would probably introduce my sons to Harrison Ford” and then Harrison go, ‘I think I’d probably take the kid’s beer away.’ I needed Harrison Ford to leave, and [I said,] ‘I think it’d be fun if you left and had to come back for your hat.’ And he said, ‘I’d have to come back and give her a smooch.’ I [said] “Oh, of course.” And whether it’s, Jessica adding jokes and adding moments that I didn’t expect, for me, to get to direct these little moments that come from nowhere, that’s the stuff that made it really fun to direct and see how good they all are.”

Lawrence unpacked more elements of the Season 2 finale as well as what the Season 3 theme of “moving forward” will look like for the Shrinking ensemble in the below interview.

DEADLINE: I spoke with Christa [Miller] a couple weeks ago about the music, and she had mentioned to me that there was a song that the writers kept singing on set and that she really wanted to be in the finale. Was that the Chappell Roan song “Femininomenon”?

BILL LAWRENCE: Yeah, I think so. She couldn’t help herself. My wife’s so good at that music supervision stuff. She kills it.

DEADLINE: Do you envision Brett Goldstein’s character coming back for Season 3?

LAWRENCE: Yeah, I gotta leverage that dude. I think the ending was satisfying. I hope it was for people. But I think I’ve been public about saying the first year is about grief, the second year was about forgiveness and third year’s about moving forward. I don’t think you can do this show about moving forward without knowing how that guy’s life moves forward, at least for an episode or two. So now I just got to leverage Brett into doing what I want him to do. He’s a very busy man. It’s very frustrating.

DEADLINE: I mean, with that theme of found family, I feel like he enters that. I don’t know if you feel that way by the finale.

LAWRENCE: I feel like it’s more about forgiveness. I think an interesting story to look at is, you see fans go “I don’t like it. I think it’d be weird for you to have to embrace the guy that killed [Tia]. I love all the narrative on our show, because I used to talk about TV that way, and I still do, the TV I like. But it’s based on real stuff, a couple sad stories that are connected to us on the show, and one that you can certainly go and read a thousand versions of: when a kid drinking and driving kills another kid, and the families stay together because you don’t want to lose two lives from it. So I don’t know if it’s as much found family as exploring if it is a little odd for that person still to be around, or if it’s more about we can’t all move forward unless each one of us moves forward.

DEADLINE: You also have that How I Met Your Mother, reunion between Jason and Cobie Smulders. Could you see her character coming back?

LAWRENCE: She’s the physical representation, personification of what moving forward means to him, and the way I’ve always done TV shows is it’s fun to have people that we love anyways on and whether that’s Ted McGinley or Cobie or Damon Wayans [Jr.] or Wendie Mali c k, if they’re really good, I immediately start torturing them and begging them to do more.

DEADLINE: Kelly Bishop was another great addition this season. Do you have anyone in mind for Season 3?

LAWRENCE: Not yet, but that’s the fun for me. It makes me so happy to see Neil Flynn doing this show too. Because sometimes people say “Bill, everybody from Spin City was in Scrubs, everybody inSscrubs, was in Cougar Town.” I’m like, “Good.” If I find people I think are super talented, and I happen to love them and think they’re awesome, it’s such a gift to get to work with the people you care about again in front of and behind the camera.

DEADLINE: Yes! Like Ashley Nicole Black, she enters the end. And Meredith Hagner (who plays Sarah in Shrinking), too is more in Bad Monkey. The Shrinking Season 2 finale is titled “The Last Thanksgiving.” Is it Paul’s last Thanksgiving? What does that mean?

LAWRENCE: If it was, I would not tell you, but I don’t know. I’m saying this honestly, we’re just now writing a third season. I don’t know if I could stomach having to see that, and I haven’t decided yet. I will tell you this: what we really care about, Brett and me, both with our family connections to Parkinson’s, is an accurate and inspiring representation of what people that have to deal with that sh*t go through, and what it means moving forward. I think that will be touching and hard to watch, and if I knew where it ended, I wouldn’t tell you, but I can be honest and say I don’t know where it ends yet.

DEADLINE: Detail on that part, when he “forgot” to go when everyone was sharing their gratitude, was that a Parkinson’s thing, or was he more just distracted by his “duress”?

LAWRENCE: No, that’s a good question, but I think in that one, it’s just his hesitancy to decide whether or not he was ready to tell everybody what he told them.

DEADLINE: I also spoke with Michael Urie a couple weeks ago about Brian’s monologue, which is really fun. He told me, which I’m sure you talk about all the time on set, each character gets served a problem and then a solution within the episodes themselves. I was wondering more broadly, over this season, how you feel, like everyone left off in the finale to set up for next season?

LAWRENCE: Well, this is the interesting thing, is this theory of forgiveness. When we said it’s about forgiveness, everyone’s like, “Oh, Jimmy is going to forgive someone, but we intentionally, if people think about it, did a bazillion forgiveness stories — Gaby and her mom, Gaby and [Derrick #2], Liz and her husband. Brian, his husband is essentially forgiving him for not wanting to [raise a child with him]. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a therapist that wouldn’t say that, for most people and most problems, forgiveness is the entryway in the core to whatever is going to come down the path next.

For Jimmy, the biggest thing in this one wasn’t just forgiving Louis. It’s forgiving himself for what a piece of sh*t father he was, and so what we did, the first year we intentionally wanted people to talk about, “Yo, if anybody did this, there’d be consequences, and this is messed up.” And there were consequences, and then you had to go, “Oh, next year is going to be f*cked up, right?” And then this year, in a manipulative way, we’re trying to make people think. People might have noticed, I directed the last episode. We shot it the same way we shot the finale the first year. There’s probably a lot of people watching that end scene thinking that [it] was going to end with something as drastic and as negative as the “boop” thing. But instead, we wanted to feel like the second year had closure and said, “Oh sh*t. People have gotten over the main part of the mountain of dealing with grief and forgiving themselves and forgiving each other. So, in the third year, again about moving forward, I think every single character, even right now, just from me saying that generic thing, you would probably go, “Hey, I was thinking about it,” and Alice is supposed to go to college, and Sean still lives in a pool house, and Jimmy met Cobie Smulders. We always put easter eggs for what people need to work on the next year.

DEADLINE: I loved too, how the final scene with Jason and Brett was set to the same song by the same artist.

LAWRENCE: Different version, because there’s a trick to make people think. Your brain goes, “Oh shit, something bad’s gonna happen” like something did in the beginning.

DEADLINE: I loved also the balcony scene, because I know Liz and Jimmy have good talks up there, so that was really fun. She throws him the rock, it’s so good.

LAWRENCE: Someone asked me this morning, not a reporter, if everybody’s got a rock now. I didn’t have an answer, so we gotta figure it out. I don’t think Paul has a rock. I think he might be the only current regular without a rock, although I’m not sure Michael Uribe has one.

DEADLINE: I’m curious about Brian and Charlie and the baby. And of course, Liz is going to help raise the baby too.

LAWRENCE: That’s a moving forward thing too because in our heads, the best thing for dealing with internal conflict when you’re talking about people is fear. And if you ask Randall Winston, he’s our director producer, and the story of Charlie and Brian, It’s based on Randall his husband’s adoption. They have two great kids, and they’re older now, but we’re stealing a lot of their life because I’m rarely as good at making stuff up. Brian always wanted a baby, he’s just terrified and of it, and it’s going to be good for me to see in the moving forward of it all, what those two look like as parents with Liz’s help. And if Liz’s pipe dream is getting to do that again, it’s a good thing to wrestle with.

DEADLINE: Congrats on the renewal of Bad Monkey. It’s moving to LA?

LAWRENCE: Thank you. The show’s not moving to L.A. Production’s moving to L.A. We’ll still shoot a bunch in Florida, but Vince’s family, my other jobs, instead of our sound stages being at a warehouse in Florida, inland Florida, they’ll be here, and when we go to Florida, itwill be to shoot the cool stuff on the beaches and the towns the production value.

DEADLINE: We spoke with you before the renewal about potential source material for Season 2, and it’s changed since then.

LAWRENCE: You know why, because, in a good way, we’re still going to use Razor Girl, Carl’s book, but I think in a good way, with input from my partners at Warner Brothers and Apple, Razor Girl is not really a sequel to Bad Monkey. It doesn’t have Yancy in it, but it doesn’t even have a lot of the other same characters. People seem to dig at least the characters that are still alive [laughs]. We’re gonna figure out a story before we get to Razor Girl, kind of keeping them in the world because Natalie [Martinez]’s so good, Michelle [Monaghan]’s so good, John Ortiz, Ronald Peet and so many people, [Alex] Moffat. [It will be] fun to see ‘em back in the world again.

DEADLINE: Anybody else you’re eyeing to come into that universe?

LAWRENCE: That’s part of the fun, I think, is once the show works — and we already talked about it with Shrinking — and looks like it might be fun, instead of desperately begging cool actors and actresses and friends to come to your show ,like the I begged Zach [Braff] to “Come be on Bad Monkey for three episodes and die.” I thought he was awesome. Then you get to graduate to pick from cool actors and actresses once you know the story you’re telling. Wish Meredith could still be alive and Jody, but they’re both super dead.

DEADLINE: For the Scrubs the reboot that’s moved forward, have you landed on a showrunner yet?

LAWRENCE: I can’t say anything, but they’re trying to make the show runner deals as we speak, and you guys will hear as soon as it comes out.

DEADLINE: Is there anyone who’s definitely not coming back to the reboot?

LAWRENCE: I love those folks. I would be surprised if you didn’t see anybody. Part of it’ll be determined by who’s in a show already and who’s working, but I think that’ll just be in this modern television world, who can do a few episodes and who’s regular.

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