Psychotherapy and Jewishness are inextricably linked. The discipline’s earliest practitioners had primarily Jewish upbringings, most of the earliest patients in 19th century Vienna were Jewish, and the whole practice came out of Jewish traditions concerning mental wellness and spiritual counseling. The public image of therapy has been shaped largely by Jewish storytellers like Woody Allen and comics like Richard Lewis.
The throughlines connecting Judaism and therapy are so unambiguous that a show like The Sopranos carved out its initial niche from the relative novelty of depicting therapy through a different cultural context (even Analyze This featured a Semitic shrink as a counterpoint to its focal insecure Italian mobster).
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Linkages, however obvious, can present an opportunity for substantive thought if they’re the product of consideration, but this proves to be just one of many ways that Apple TV+’s The Shrink Next Door falls aggravatingly short. The undeniable rapport between stars Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd carries the show a certain distance, but whether viewers are frustrated by a tonal inconsistency I might generously call “ambitious,” the inability to use a scripted series format to plumb greater depths than Joe Nocera’s solid Wondery podcast, or the way the series wastes bigger questions of identity on a superficial text of performative Jewishness, it’s hard to remain consistently engaged over eight episodes.
Frustration, incidentally, would be baked into The Shrink Next Door even if it felt like all its creative elements were drawn from the same page. It’s a story designed to frustrate you.
Sticking closely to the reporting on the podcast, creator Georgia Pritchett and directors Michael Showalter and Jesse Peretz introduce us to Marty Markowitz (Ferrell) in 1982. Marty is an insecure, well-meaning pushover. Nearly 40, he’s managing the fabric business left to him by his recently deceased parents, and his personal life is built around a co-dependent relationship with his sister, Phyllis (Kathryn Hahn). At her urging, Marty sits down with therapist Ike Herschkopf (Rudd). Ike sees an opportunity in “Easy Mark” Markowitz, and, in very little time, he’s overbilling Marty for appointments and instigating a process of manipulation that makes Ike central to every aspect of Marty’s life, from his struggling company to halting attempts at dating to the options for entertainment at Marty’s house in the Hamptons.
As a result, Phyllis doesn’t trust Ike, and even his wife, Bonnie (Casey Wilson), finds the new union unorthodox. But Ike is an attention-starved shark — his aspirations range from candid snapshots with celebrities to leadership positions in his synagogue — and nothing can separate him from his docile chum.
The story stretches over 27 years. Even if you’ve listened to the podcast and you have a pretty good idea what’s coming, it’s hard not to be vaguely agog at the things Ike is able to get Marty to do. As central as psychology is to the story, Nocera was more amazed by the mechanics of the unfathomable fraud. Pritchett follows suit, a choice that won’t reward viewers trying to understand how Marty got himself into this situation, much less why Ike did what he did, but one that positions The Shrink Next Door as the sort of blend of con-artist and cult drama that audiences have been flocking to recently.
Treating Ike as a cult leader, one who’s adept at isolating his followers from “toxic” loved ones and separating them from their checkbooks, becomes either intriguing or problematic when we realize that his religion of choice is Judaism. The throughline I mentioned earlier is one that The Shrink Next Door surely could have followed, exploring the connection between one specific faith and therapy, delving into how investment in both, in the name of self-improvement, can lead to different kinds of dependency that can, in turn, lead to victimization.
Unfortunately, The Shrink Next Door doesn’t have much of a perspective on the pros and cons of therapy, and even though Jewishness keeps finding its way to the forefront of the story, be it Ike’s recommendation that Marty recover his masculinity by having a second bar mitzvah or the use of a deli platter for a bris that never happened for laughs, what the storytellers and their stars engage in is more Jew-signaling than the sort of spiritual introspection Judaism strongly endorses. If the show can’t really do justice to Jewishness in general, Jewish masculinity is well outside its reach.
The use of Jewishness in the scripts probably isn’t offensive in itself, but when you have a cast anchored by non-Jews — Rudd is the exception — it’s impossible not to think that at some point a conscious decision was made by every actor in the cast to “play Jewish” in the broadest possible terms. Collectively they embody something closer to Borscht Belt Jewish shtick than actual characters, much less the actual people whose voices can be heard on the podcast sounding nothing at all like the Jackie Mason-adjacent blueprint followed by the ensemble. As best I can explain it, The Shrink Next Door has a vision that might have been realized best with Paul Reiser and Richard Kind in the lead roles, but the series went with a pair of movie stars basically playing Paul Reiser and Richard Kind types.
One can see what attracted Ferrell and Rudd, even before the opportunity to ham it up (treif pun intended). Marty has been infantilized — the real Marty is far more capable and composed, and therefore his duping is more complicated — and transformed into an extreme version of the sort of man-child archetype Ferrell has built a career upon, the logical tension of Buddy the Elf or the crippling daddy issues of the actor’s version of George W. Bush. Rudd has gotten good mileage out of fast-talking slickness over the years, but it’s clear that somebody thought it would be funny to have an actor whose agelessness is the stuff of memes playing a character who undergoes all manner of exaggerated aging over three decades, making the show, on some level, a limited series of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The script mostly treats the characters seriously, rarely engaging in any overt hilarity at all, but the actors find a slew of odd ways to bring comedy to the story’s fringes. These start with the ethnic caricaturing and find the most traction in odd bits of physical business, out-of-nowhere goofy montages, and flailing limbs that add a vein of Anchorman to what otherwise would have a closer tonal similarity to Woody Allen in Bergman mode than whichever Woody Allen movie features Will Ferrell essentially playing Woody Allen. I almost wish Ferrell had been given the chance to play Marty with full sincerity, because in later episodes, as Marty’s sadness and loneliness rise to the surface, Ferrell is responsible for the moments that give The Shrink Next Door occasional resonance. The series and the performances make Marty’s failings too obvious and Ike’s motivations too irrelevant, and both key female figures in the story are reduced to a single dimension, played loudly by Hahn and softly by Wilson.
It all results in a show I found more effective in the final few episodes than the first couple of installments, but one whose tone and themes are never fully convincing. That uncertainty is reflected even in the episodes’ running times, which range from 35 minutes to a draggy 50 minutes. Mainly what held my interest in The Shrink Next Door was the myriad reasons it doesn’t quite work.
[The series was produced by MRC Television, a division of MRC, which is a co-owner of The Hollywood Reporter through a joint venture with Penske Media titled PMRC.]
