Even More TV: Shrinking and Daisy Jones & the Six

Let's face it, you can never get enough prestige TV in your life. And now Apple and Amazon have given us two stunning shows that I couldn't get enough of. Let's get into it.

Shrinking: First off, this show has amazing pedigree. The fact that it was created by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein should already tip you off that this show is going to be both funny and bursting with heart. Then the cast boasts Jason Segel, Jessica Williams...and Harrison freakin' Ford. What follows is an incredibly funny show about grief, therapy, friendship, and family. I dutifully tuned in every single week after each cliffhanger, jonesing to find out what happens next, and I'm jealous that newcomers to the show now just get to binge it all in one fell swoop. But at the end, we're all going to be in the same boat, i.e. desperately clamoring for the second season.

The show follows Jimmy (Segel), a man who has been widowed for a year and is not doing a great job of processing his grief or parenting his teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), much to the chagrin of his next-door neighbor, Liz (Christa Miller), an intense but caring woman who is dealing with her own empty nest by caring for Alice while Jimmy is AWOL. To make things even more interesting, Jimmy is a therapist, so while his personal life is a mess, he must still offer support and counselling to his clients. Things start to take a turn when he decides to take an overly involved approach to therapy, getting very invested in his patients' lives and not just restricting his interactions with them to his office. One such patient is Sean (Luke Tennie), a young Afghanistan War veteran who now needs helps dealing with his PTSD and anger issues, and ends up living in Jimmy's house. Which no therapist would advise, but it certainly works for comedy purposes.

Harrison Ford plays Paul, Jimmy's boss and mentor, while Gaby (Jessica Williams) is his colleague who was also his wife's best friend. As such, this is a very close-knit group of colleagues who struggle with the fact that their personal and professional boundaries are all over the place. No therapist will be recommending this show as a how-to guide on running your practice, but this is a beautiful and loving sitcom on having a supportive social structure to lean on in your darkest moments. Watching these characters evolve over the course of these ten episodes and make mistakes (OK, a LOT of mistakes) is a joy. So much happens, most of which you won't even see coming, and that final episode ends in a way that will make you deliriously impatient for the second season. I don't know how they're going to write their way out of that cliffhanger, but I certainly can't wait to see them try. 

Daisy Jones & the Six: I loved the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid so I was certainly intrigued to discover Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber had turned it into a show. And oh what a show it turned out to be. The story starts as an oral history, where a woman is interviewing the members of a fictional 70's rock n' roll band that was massively popular but then died a sudden death. The members of the band haven't spoken publicly about their history, but they are now sharing it all for this documentary, so we will get to see their rise and fall interspersed with talking head footage of them as they reflect on what came to pass.

The stars of the show are Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, playing Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne, the two lead singers of the band who have an intense and chaotic relationship. They are incredible songwriters who can frenetically feed off each other's energy to come up with epic records, but they are both battling their own demons and a tendency towards self-destruction that makes them an explosive combination. Billy's wife, Camila (Camila Marrone), is a patient and nurturing woman, but she is also puzzled by this duo's dynamic, and in the meantime, we have the other members of the band (played deftly by Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Josh Whitehouse, and Sebastian Chacon) who all harbor their own dreams and ambitions and often find themselves unable to focus on the music because of the maelstrom of personal drama that is always swirling around the band.

Over the course of ten episodes, this show gives us a complete portrait of every band member and slowly ratchets up the tension until the fateful night of their final concert when everything comes to a head and the band simply dissolves into nothingness. The costume and production design is amazing and perfectly captures this moment in American music history. But the main thing I want to talk about is the music. At first, I wasn't wholly sold. Songs would get parceled out in bits and pieces and I found myself more compelled by a joyous rendition of Ooh La La that the band performs during a blackout, than any of the supposedly magical songs Daisy and Billy concoct. But oh man. Once they start to perform these songs on stage, and once we see how Claflin and Keough can change the performance every time depending on what phase of their relationship they're in, I couldn't get enough. These songs are absolute bangers, particularly Look at Us Now and Aurora, which I have not been able to stop humming. It's one thing to act, but to be able to sing like this is astonishing and Claflin and Keough deserve to get a whole heap of kudos as well as a spot on the Billboard charts. So give this show a try. It's truly an audiovisual feast; and when you're done, I highly recommend reading the novel to complete your immersion.