KsMIRT=Kent's Month in Reviewing Television. This week, the Bill Lawrence trifecta.
This time:
Shrinking Season 3 (2026, 10/11 episodes watched, AppleTV)
Scrubs Season 1 (2026, 7/10 episodes watched, Disney+?)
Rooster Season 1 (2026, 5/10 episodes watched, HBO)
Bill Lawrence has been making TV for over 30 years, starting out as a writer with scripts for Boy Meets World, The Nanny and Friends before getting his first shot at creating a show, and hitting right out the gate with Spin City. Co-created with Gary David Goldberg, Spin City ran for 6 seasons and starred Michael J. Fox in a situation comedy that followed him as the deputy mayor of New York and the mayoral staff dealing with the chaos the city never fails to provide.
I never watched a single episode of Spin City, but, I should really go back, as I've been a fan of almost every Bill Lawrence created/co-created production since. Clone High (co-created with Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller) and Scrubs were comedic game changers in the early aughts, bridging silliness and sentimentality in unexpected ways. Cougar Town quickly abandoned its premise of following a forty-something divorcee attempting to hook up with younger men and instead became one of the greatest hangout and drink wine sitcoms (perhaps the greatest?) ever, again where silliness was plentiful.
Skipping past whatever Ground Floor was and the forgotten Rush Hour tv remake, 20 years into his show-creating career Lawrence hit the stratosphere with the most essential watching of the COVID era, Ted Lasso, co-created with Jason Sudekis, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly. Ted Lasso, about an American football coach being brought to England to coach a British football team, with the intent on tanking the team, wound up being the feel-good show everyone needed in a crazy time. The show's positivity and emotional intelligence were front and center, and perhaps hinted at a world where sporting could host the opposite of toxic masculinity, and maybe be therapeudic as well as fun and exciting and dramatic. Also, not unlike Cougar Town, it basically evolved into a hangout show.
Ending Ted Lasso after three seasons was always part of the plan, but it certainly was not a well received ending by many fans (this fan thought it was time), but viewers wouldn't be devoid of Lawrence's particular style of gentle comedy for too long as he, along with Lasso co-star and co-writer Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Muppets) developed Shrinking and, with the Ted Lasso clout behind them managed to pull none other than Harrison fucking Ford as co-star on the show.
I've covered both Season 1 and Season 2 of the show, and in my first season write-up I talk about "the pivot" the show makes in the first season, starting out as a centerpiece for grieving widower fuck-up psychologist Jimmy (Segel) trying to find some balance to his life again (therapist, heal thyself), to, ultimately winding up as a hangout comedy. Cougar Town had 24 episodes in its first season to make such a pivot, that Shrinking managed to do it within 10 was pretty spectacular. By the end of the second season, the Shrinking team was in pretty complete control of what it wanted to be, and how it wanted to be it. It's a show about trauma and healing, the power of friendship and therapy. It's as if COVID did a real number on the mental health of its creators, and they wanted to bring to the world the idea that there's real health benefits in making connections with others.
By this third season, the core cast has settled in, their interpersonal dynamics firmly in place, and their nuances quite familiar. Lest things get too comfortable, it's time to shake things up. Alice (Lukita Maxwell) is graduating and going off to college, Brian (Michael Urie) is having a baby, and Sean's (Luke Tennie) food truck is going good but he gets a job offer he can't refuse. Jimmy may have found a real romantic connection for the first time since his wife's death with Sofie (Cobie Smulders). Liz's (Christa Miller) beautiful idiot not-quite-adult boys cause trouble, while Derek (Ted McGinley) has a cardiac issue. Gabby (Jessica Williams) takes on a challenging new client while also looking at the future of her career. Paul (Ford) deals with new complications of Parkinsons (fuck Parkinsons) and makes some big life decisions.
The third season is full of meaty half-hour episodes, finding the right balance of humour and emotion...which is to say mostly funny but able to support real weighty material. Last season introduced Brett Goldstein as the drunk driver who killed Tia (Jimmy's wife, Alice's mom) and Alice and Jimmy managed to find real connection with and ultimately forgiveness for him. This season continues that relationship for a short time but reasonably finds an ending, prompted by Gabby (Tia's best friend) who is short on forgiveness and not quiet about it. Jimmy's dad (Jeff Daniels) also turns up more than once and whatever progress Jimmy made in the past two years is somewhat undone by his father's presence. A fairweather father, Randy has always entered and disappeared from Jimmy's life at his own whim, and Jimmy's abandonment issues stemming from his father, the death of Tia, and now Alice and Paul's leaving all come to a pretty ugly head by the end of episode 10.
Mercifully it's not the final episode, with one more to go, but given the sweeping changes of this season, "will there be a Season 4" is the big question in my mind. It was always clear that having Harrison Ford was not going to be a long-term thing for the show. Getting thirty-one episodes out of the man was kind of a miracle, but it's also an incredible late-stage role for Ford. He gets a lot of mileage both comedically and dramatically out of his grizzled exterior, but where season 1 Paul was just a Harrison Ford-type role, by season 3 he's most definitely Paul, not the biggest movie star of all time. But he's also very much a co-star on this sitcom that feels like he's sharing equal space when in a scene with a sitcom vet like Miller or relative newcomers like Maxwell and Tennie (also we get to see Ford share scenes with guest stars like Jeff Daniels, Michael J. Fox as well a Candice Bergen which is beautiful to see these amazing veteran actors together). It's a Bill Lawrence special, finding chemistry between all the players in the cast, finding a reason to have even the two most disparate characters share the screen. There's no ego in Ford's performance, and in the closing episodes of the season, the amount of hugs the man begrudgingly gives out shows that there was meaning for him in the experience
The third season opener was a hefty 40-minute episode, and the real worry was that Shrinking would fall down the Ted Lasso rabbit hole of overlong episodes. Comedy needs tight timing, editing, and for sitcoms, they need a sense of consistency and familiarity in storytelling. While Shrinking isn't bound by specific sets, it also doesn't have the same go-anywhere liberty that Ted Lasso did, and so in keeping each episode in the rest of the season (save its opener and probably its finale) under a half hour was pretty key, and seemingly purposeful.
With all the shifts to the series this season, if it does come back for a fourth, the pieces are in place for other players to step up into larger roles, and there's no shortage of people who seem interested in stepping into a Bill Lawrence production, given the names and faces that work their way into the show.
In the relaunch, J.D. has been acting as a private physician for the Los Angeles elite, but he's not feeling fulfilled. When a patient winds up at Sacred Heart, he runs into Dr. Cox (McGinley) who is having trouble relating to the fresh batch of interns. Seeing J.D. interact with them inspires him to give up his seat as chief of medicine, and passes it on to J.D. This immediately makes a rival out of Dr. Park (Joel Kim Booster) who was vying for the role. In returning to the hospital he's reunited with his BFF Turk, now the head of surgery. It also reunites him with Elliot, his ex-wife... and he's now her boss.
The show, somehow, falls right into its old patterns and tone that feels like it hasn't missed a beat, that it hasn't been 15 years since it was last on the air. J.D. still daydreams (those quick-cutaways into J.D.'s fantasies are still there, though feel a little less silly and a little more sad coming from a 50-something, but they commit to the bits and they can still be pretty funny), and he and Turk still have their hetero life mate dynamic. J.D. and Elliot's dynamic is pretty much the same as we left it, full of tension, only the will-they/wont-they has long been resolved. There's mercifully not a lot of bitterness between them, and it really seems like they're still wanting to be friends, but a lot of history and feelings get in the way.
Since Reyes can't be in the show full-time, Carla's stand-ins are Pippa (X Mayo) and Francios (Michael James Scott) as the sassiest of sassy nurses who best be kept happy. They're comic relief from the peripherals at this time and not the most fleshed out characters, but they're delightful. Vanessa Bayer (Saturday Night Live) is the new head of HR as well as the hospital's wellness director and comes hard with Bayer's patented style of awkward energy. There are only hints so far, but her character is going to get real weird, for sure.
The quintet of interns are going to have a hard time evolving in a truncated ten episode season. They each are monotrope characters that are going to have a hard time escaping their one defining characteristic. Asher (Jacob Dudman) is a nebbish Brit, Sam (Ava Bunn) is a social media influencer, Blake (David Gridley) is handsome and egotistical, Amara (Layla Mohammadi) was homeschooled and is socially awkward, while Dashana (Amanda Morrow) is overconfident to a fault. The show has Asher crushing on Amara, and Amara maybe finding herself more into Blake, and then really seems to be leaning on the animosity Sam has for Blake for future will-they/wont-theys, but there's not been enough time to really invest in any of these characters to care all that much about them. Bunn is the standout performer of the five of them, but her character Sam has yet to reveal herself, while Blake has the most depth, since he seems to be the one hiding the most secrets. If this were old TV seasons of 20+ episodes, there would be no worry that these characters would expand and each would get at least one spotlight, but as it stands any spotlights must be shared between them.
The Bill Lawrence of today is not the Bill Lawrence of Scrubs season 1-9, which means that at some point I'm expecting the whole hospital setting, the characters doing the rounds and visiting patients, to really recede into the background (much like how the importance of the time with patients in Shrinking has, well, shrunk over 3 seasons) and the hang-out feels come to the fore. Once we start seeing unexpected pairings of characters, then you know it's happening. That said, this is the most situational of situation comedies where the situation will undoubtedly impede on any hanging out. I think the majority of the first season will be focused primarily on the series finding its core in Elliot, Turk and J.D. so that it's solid enough to let them lean back some and give way to the others in the future.
Where Shrinking has extended family and patients filling out its peripherals, and Scrubs has patients and student interns bolstering its roster, Lawrence's third concurrent series Rooster (co-created with Matt Tarsis), finds its collection assembled from students and teachers. There are no sessions or rounds, but there are classrooms, so the ingredients are not all that dissimilar. Nor are they unfamiliar.
Set on the New England campus of Ludlow College, the show is named for the main character in Greg Russo's (Carrell) series of dad-friendly action hero novels. Russo is visiting the campus to give a guest lecture, but it's just an excuse for him to check in on his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) who teaches there. Katie's just been involved in a campus scandal where her professor husband, Archie (Dunster), was outed as having an affair with a graduate student, Sunny (Lauren Tsai). Vibes are weird on campus.
Nobody is more excited to have Russo on campus than Dean Walter Mann (McGinley) who is hoping Russo will stay on as writer-in-resident at the college, and teaching the writing class for the semester. The position was supposed to go to a friend of Prof. Dylan Sheperd (Danielle Deadwyler), and so an early awkward romantic encounter between them becomes even more awkward now that he's sticking around.
Carrell has an energy that has served him well throughout his prolific career. His sense of discomfort mixed with a need to please make him unwittingly witty, likeably nonthreatening, and also sympathetic. Carrell has a gift for playing awkward characters without ever leaning into the cringe factor. Cringe comedy relies upon a character obliviously behaving in ways that will obviously provoke an uncomfortable situation, a Carrell character is all-too aware that he is behaving in an manner that makes situations uncomfortable and his effusive, conciliatory and apology-laden attempts to back out of it is what disarms any cringe. Also, a running joke already, only four episodes in, is Russo getting written up and standing before the board for his unintentional behaviour.
In the background, the show about a middle-aged progressives view of what it means to be liberal in modern times, when the modern kids have grown up with much more progressive and rigid standards around what its offensive and to whom and why. McGinley's Dean Mann is a liberal for sure, but is confounded by the kids that are in his school and what triggers them, but his kind of staunchness about not caring if he's offensive contrasts against Russo who never wants to offend but always does (and then there's Ruck's Dean Riggs who is definitely a conservative who Mann is further contrasted against).
I'm unfamiliar with Charly Clive as a performer, but she's getting a real spotlight role here. Clive manages to be one of the messiest people currently on television without being even close to becoming a nightmare to watch. She is very much Greg Russo's daughter. She brings warmth and sympathy to Katie, while also still being somewhat incapable of getting out of her own way. It's a funny dynamic she has with Dunster who should be an absolute villain, yet, Katie still loves him and we can see, if only a hint, as to why. Of course, he is also a monster, and the relationship he has with Sunny should be problematic, but Sunny is also a character here too, not a villain, and one who is much more an active participant in her relationship than a passive one (she's also somewhat spectrum coded, which will be interesting to see if the show actually explores).
There are numerous supporting players, including the local campus police officer (Rory Scoville) and Mann's assistant (Annie Mumolo) as well as over a half dozen familar student faces already populating the campus and classrooms. In true Lawrence fashion, we're seeing the mixing and matching of these characters only a few episodes in, so while there's a lot of entanglements to sort through, the "hangout" vibes are already in sight.
Rooster is a funny, warm, and hilariously melodramatic show ... like at the end of the first episode Katie burns down Archie's house by accident after he tells her that Sunny is pregnant. There are repercussions but nothing in this show is presented as end of the world for anyone. It's another Lawrence specialty being able to find both the comedic and emotional core, and to balance them just right.
Rooster is already an immediate favourite, and if Shrinking is coming to an end or going on hiatus, it is the perfect replacement. Scrubs I let go of midway through its original run, most probably because life was a bit tumultuous at the time (and I may not have had access to cable) rather than anything to do with the quality of the show in its later seasons, but at the same time despite being capably updated, it still feels like a show I watched 20 year ago and I'm not necessarily that committed to sticking with it.
If Shrinking ends with this third season, I'll be okay with it, but I really want to see what a Season 4 would look like given all the fluctuations we're seeing at this season's close. (But if we're talking about a Lawrence show I'm desperate to see return, well, where's Season 2 of Bad Monkey, Bill?) We're in another crazy time, surely the craziest in our lifetime and not getting brighter any time soon, so these are the feel-good shows we kind of need in theses.
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