On The Shrink Next Door, Marty’s big breakthrough underwhelms [Apple TV+ recap]

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The Shrink Next Door recap: What this show needs is a serious comeuppance.
What this show needs is a serious comeuppance.
Photo: Apple TV+

Apple TV+’s The Shrink Next Door hits the boiling point in this week’s episode. After suffering three decades of passive aggression, manipulation, bad advice, greed and sabotage, Marty finally has his fill of Ike and decides to take action.

It’s too little too late for Will Ferrell‘s character — and for this increasingly unpleasant show — which is about to wrap up on a distinctly unsatisfying note.

The Shrink Next Door recap: ‘The Breakthrough’

Marty’s employees Bruce (played by Cornell Womack) and Cathy (Robin Bartlett) finally get the minute of his time they’ve been begging for the whole series. They want to talk to Marty about cost overruns and the malign influence of his psychiatrist, Ike (Paul Rudd). The shrink has been negatively affecting Marty’s life and things the office he took over for the last 30 years. It’s now 2010, and they finally get to tell him the company’s going under.

This is a bad time for Marty to hear bad news. He’s got a hernia and needs surgery — and the extra stress is making it worse. Still, he goes under the knife. And when he wakes up, he expects a visit from Ike at some point but it never comes. He waits days and Ike never arrives.

An unsatisfying snap

This is when Marty finally snaps. He drives to the Hamptons house and gives Ike a piece of his mind, right in the middle of a theme party. Of course, Ike is ready for him. He quickly reverses the guilt trip in classic Ike fashion. Bonnie (Casey Wilson) picks up on Marty’s distress and tries to stop the party, but Ike refuses. Very unsatisfying, as usual.

It isn’t until Marty realizes that Ike didn’t take care of his fish, and let one of them die, that he really and truly turns on Ike. You can imagine how truly anticlimactic that is. He wrecks the lawn as best he can, and quietly moves the fabric store to New Jersey (following Bruce’s advice).

When Marty doesn’t show up for therapy the next week, Ike tracks him down and makes a scene. Marty has finally done everything Bruce and Cathy asked for, including getting rid of private offices — and Ike can’t stand it. Marty stands up for himself and fires Ike in front of everyone. The whole office claps. Sure, yeah, celebrate. After 30 years, go ahead and celebrate.

I have dedicated my life to you

It’s just not enough. The Shrink Next Door can pat Marty on the back for finally taking a stand but it also seems to forget that Ike only immiserated everyone at the office with Marty’s help and permission. How they held onto hope that the old Marty was still in there is something the writers really ought to have gone into. Because suddenly asking us all to believe that we’ve been given a happy ending to this story (or the start of one, there’s still one episode left) is extreme wishful thinking.

Marty’s life has gotten away from him completely. He ruined his health and his relations. He made his co-workers feel small and unimportant. And he became party to Ike’s terrible, dissolving marriage while allowing himself to be lonely so he could better attend to Ike’s needs. It’s … well, it’s just not enough.

Letting Ike off easy is a lazy move

This episode really ought to have been a barnstormer, a full-on buffet of revenge on the despicable Ike. But the show lets him off easy, embarrassing him slightly in front of people who never liked or respected him in the first place. After every petty thing Ike has done, The Shrink Next Door’s writers let him off the hook.

I should have known, ultimately, because this show doesn’t have the courage to grow the spikes needed to make this hurt as bad as it all ought to. I must once again point to the cast: No show with Rudd and Ferrell was ever going to be in danger of being truly edgy.

The actors’ handlers won’t let them, they have no interest, they’re incapable as performers — pick a reason. It hardly matters by now. But man, is it quite the slap in the face to make it this far into this story and still get disappointed by the worm turning in so cautious and cozy a fashion.

I forgot to mention (because it has no business being on the show) that in the opening, there’s a film noir pastiche as Ike dictates his dreadful crime novel to Marty, who types it up. It’s a cutesy gesture in a show that’s already too cute by half, and you’ve probably forgotten it by the end of the episode anyway, so I really don’t know what it’s doing here. There’s so much business about accents in the bit, too, which is a bad move on a show where the leads can’t keep theirs going for more than a few minutes at a time.

Watch The Shrink Next Door on Apple TV+

New episodes of The Shrink Next Door premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.

Rated: TV-MA

Watch on: Apple TV+

Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On The Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the author of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.

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