KsMIRT: BLaw BLaw BLawrence

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.

Which is also what makes the return of Scrubs a surprise. Where Lawrence has all the pull in Hollywood to get pretty much anyone on one of his shows, for the relaunch of Scrubs (this is called Season 1, not Season 10) Lawrence knew all the starpower he needed was the returning cast... well, some of it. Sarah Chalke as Elliot Reid, Donald Faison as Christopher Turk and Zach Braff as John (J.D.) Dorian headline the show, but the remainder of the cast is filled by newcomers, what with Ken Jenkins having retired, Judy Reyes and John C. McGinley both busy on other shows (one of which we'll get to shortly). Neil Flynn's absence is a mystery.

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.

Rooster stars Steve Carrell as its central figure, but Lawrence isn't shy about hiring familiar faces from his other shows. Both John C. McGinley (Scrubs), Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso), and Alan Ruck (Spin City) are here, and if Lawrence's other series' offer any insights, there will be more former cast members involved eventually.

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. 

3 Short Paragraphs: Fall 2011 (pt 9)

OK, this really seems to be the season of redefining what Men are supposed to be. We had the abysmal How To Be a Gentleman which I am pretty sure got pulled before episode 4 aired but now we have two other sitcoms, each with their own approach on it. In the standard running is Last Man Standing, the latest vehicle from the 90s Man's Man, Tim Allen.  This time round he is the director of catalog marketing for an outdoors-men store, sort of the MEC of hunting & fishing.  His job of traveling around with a camera crew taking delicious shots for the catalog comes to a halt when they decide to focus on the website. So he is now stuck at home with his 3 daughters while his wife returns to a big promotion. This is actually a kind hearted show where the big bravado of Tim's character is meant to be stymied and tempered by the women in his life. And despite his Male Buffoonery, he is still a nice guy at heart. I liked it but still railed at the 1% nature of his lifestyle.

Meanwhile, with Man Up!, we have the other format of sitcom where we have three manchilds who feel they need to be more Real Man. They replace machismo with first person shooters and spend most of their time being ruled by women. This show insults everyone, from the men who think they are standing up to their wives & girlfriends to the women who are walking all over their men to the kids who show less machismo than they do. It is one of those shows where we really are not supposed to like the main characters but I didn't find them funny enough to laugh at.

Enlightened is completely another spectrum of people who annoy the fuck out of me.  It's about Laura Dern who goes batshit insane after sleeping with her boss and then being turned down for a promotion. There could have been more to it but that is all we are shown. Suddenly its months later and she is experiencing New Age-y bliss at a retreat in Hawaii swimming with sea turtles and collecting shells.  She returns to LA to take back her job and renew relationships. This shows shares my annoyance with people like her who think that just because THEY figured out their issues, everyone else should just fall in line and hug it out. She exchanges one batshit for another as everyone proves to not give an iota that she went to Hawaii and swam with a turtle. I am sure the show is about how she becomes tempered in her emotions but she annoyed me so much in the first episode, I will never give her another chance.

Bonus premiere!! And while not purely in the Fall 2011 release schedule, as it started in the summer, I watched it now so why not mention?  This is wacky.  Pure wacky. A man who really wants to committ suicide because his life is drab meets his next door neighbor and her dog.  Well, dog to everyone else because Ryan sees him as a man in a dog suit.  The american remake of an Australian comedy series starring the same dog as the original completely side steps the questions you might have. Like why doesn't Ryan mention this to anyone or does the owner notice that one of Wilfred's toys is a bong?  Let's skip the questions and just play into the wackiness as Wilfred helps Ryan through his issues while doing typical dog things and typical guys in a dog suit things as well.

3 Short Paragraphs: Fall 2011 (pt 2)

Kent says he cannot stand shows with laugh tracks,which I am pretty much immune to, and that there are no more shows done "in front of a live studio audience."  That sounded wrong to me but then I listened to a couple of the ones I watch and, he was right, obvious laugh tracks. And then I heard the words at the start of Whitney and I... could... not... stop... noticing... the audience. I wasn't sure if it was the volume of that crowd or the fact I am now noticing it... all... the... time. Anywayz, sitcom about a girl who writes something and shares the name of the girl who actually writes & produces the show -- and she is the girl who also stars as said girl. She is loud and has a nice BF and annoying friends, but strangely enough, I didn't hate anyone. And once again, thought maybe not said here in this blog, I do like shows where people crack jokes so the other person in the scene laughs, not just for our sake.

So, on to the other two non-laugh track sitcoms we watched this weekend (not as they aired, because, well i download just about everything) and they are about people roughly my age who I cannot relate to whatsoever. First we have Up All Night where Christina Applegate and Will Arnett are new parents. New parents and highly successful & wealthy -- two shots against my lifestyle. From their work hard play hard lives they are now adjusting to parenting. She's back at work missing the baby and taking care of a different set of kids; he's at home playing challenged daddy and both of them are attempting to survive the subject of just about every conversation around the lunch table at work -- sleeplessness, poop, crying and never going out again.  And like work, I will probably just end up nodding & smiling should I ever watch the show again.

The other side of the adult-not-like-me fence is the newly divorced, highly successful main character.  But Free Agents is going to be less about a person's lifestyle and more about Hank Azaria's Alex and his work & his love life. It's a workplace sitcom but whoah, does it have a budget. I have to say that I watched the layout of the show as much as I chuckled at Azaria's witty asides.  Where is this shot? Some small mid-west city? It just seemed clean and crisp and fresh. Yeah, this is the kind of stuff I think about when I watch sitcoms I wouldn't generally watch even if I have nothing really to complain about. But I wonder... is this a romantic comedy or a workplace comedy? Is this about the two mains interacting or more about the crazy boss, the vicious EA and the nerdy assistant? Hmmm...

Fall Pilots 2011: Up All Night/Free Agents

NBC, Wednesdays 8:00, 8:30

I rarely spend much effort looking over the debuting shows each fall.  I don't tend to follow what's coming up, and I rarely actively seek shows out.  But if a commercial interests me or I read an article about a show that piques my curiousity or I hear that an actor or creator I like is involved in the endeavor I'll check it out.  Usually these new selections wind up staying on my radar only so briefly.  The last weekly show I stuck with after the pilot was "Community" and I don't recall which show would have been before that.  I came to most of my current viewing late.

This year, I can't say it'll be much different except that I plan to check out a few more new shows than usual, but I don't expect to be watching many of them week to week, or for much longer than a month.  There's not a lot of shows out there that can fill up a full 22-to-25 episode order and sustain my interest.

This weekend my daughter was on a play date and my friends told me they liked Up All Night, a new comedy with Cristina Applegate and... that guy.  I recalled reading about it, also starring Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph, produced by Lorne Michaels (so it's got a solid backbone).  I looked it up on "On Demand" (which makes watching TV so much easier), and found both of NBC's new Wednesday night comedies there.

Up All Night looks like the latest in a spate of "new parenting" shows, following in the heels of successes like Modern Family and Raising Hope, only this is about "cool" parents.  Successful upscale, urban dwellers who work and party hard... real douchebag types, only softened into viewer-friendly, warm, intelligent, thoughtful people and how they must adapt from their old lifestyle into responsible parents.

It's a dual purpose show with Arnett and Applegate having an incredible chemistry, and Arnett's usual severe or ostentatious personality transformed into an outright likable, affable guy.  Once a high-powered lawyer, he's taking on the stay-at-home dad role, with Applegate returning to her executive producer role on "Ava", an Oprah-meets-Ellen-style daytime chat show starring her best friend (Maya Rudolph is a natural as Ava).  Applegate is described as the only competent person working on the show, and it looked to be falling apart without her presence, especially with Rudolph adopting the diva attitude and running ramshackle over everyone else.  There's a bit of a disparity between the histrionics at the "Ava" workplace and the natural, lower-key atmosphere of the homestead, so there's either going to be a nice polarity or a jarring one as the series progresses.  It's currently up in the air.  It was a cute pilot, but not a necessarily strong one. 

On the other hand, Free Agents was both cute and strong.  Exceptionally strong.  The same idea applies as Up All Night in that the main characters are very well grounded while being surrounded by a workplace full of off-beat caricatures, but the difference is the workplace is only somewhat askew without getting too loud about it.

Newsradio just popped up on Netflix Canada, and there's a remarkable parallel between the first episodes of that show and this one, with Anthony Stewart Head taking on the Stephen Root role as the somewhat aloof head of the PR agency where Dave Foley and Maura Tierney stand-ins Hank Azaria and Katheryn Hahn work.  Jo Lo Truglio takes on the "oddball outsider" role that Joe Rogan played, while comedian Al Madrigal takes on the loveable goof that Andy Dick did and Nataha Leggero is elicits the exact same dry smarm that Vicki Lewis did.  But this isn't a knock.  Archetypes are what every comedy is built upon, it's how you differentiate them that decides whether you succeed or fail.

Here, there's a hard focus on Azaria's literally just-divorced Alex, a self-described terrible liar (who works in PR?), former rock journalist who doesn't really understand how he came to be where he is.  There's an equal focus on Hahn's Helen, a ballsy PR rep who's proven herself as tough as the guys, whose fiancee passed away a year ago and she still hasn't dealt with it.  They naturally wind up in bed together, in fact the show starts with them in bed together.  The tryst is obviously an unfortunate one, and neither is in shape for a relationship, yet they're both so very alone.

What I like about the show is how real both Alex and Helen come off, they're complex, at times they say things that sound less like a script and more like actual conversation.  They have logic but they also have emotions and are often conflicted between the two.  What's even more evident is the show may be flinging them together sexually but it seems to be building a friendship, going in the opposite direction that most do.

The supporting cast is great, with Head playing well against his usual stoic, prim/proper, fatherly, bureaucratic type into a bit of a free-thinking, does-what-he-wants showboat.  Madrigal is effortlessly charming and Leggero is nasty in an amusingly dismissive way.  Lo Truglio should make a great odd duck and an effective one if kept in a limited role.

Apparently this one's based off a British series which explains its tone and appeal.  I'm not sure if it can pad itself out over lengthy seasons effectively but it'll be interesting to see if its successful in trying.