★★★✩✩ Apple+

Someone starts to see a therapist, and over the following decades the therapist ends up taking total control of that person’s life; telling them who they can see, what they can do, dominating their finances. No, not just a rundown of my relationship with my therapist wife, this is also the true-life plot of Apple+’s new limited series The Shrink Next Door. It’s part comedy, part drama, part cringe fest — but enough about my home life, I guess you want to find out about the TV show.
Both Will Farrell and Paul Rudd independently tried to buy the rights to the award-winning documentary podcast on which this is based, before joining forces to make it together. And you can see how on paper that must’ve seemed like kismet. Two big stars for a two-hander, with previous chemistry, reuniting for the first time since their Anchorman days. Rudd playing the unctuous Dr Isaac ‘Ike’ Herschkopf, Farrell regurgitating his man-child schtick as Marty Markowitz. But alas something’s a bit off in the execution, a miscalibration of tone and emphasis.
The casting doesn’t play to either actor’s strengths. Rudd, recently voted Sexiest Man Alive — the last Jew to win was Adam — successfully schlubs it up as Ike, yet the one thing that can’t be contained behind naff 80s fashion is his innate likability. At the beginning of the story in 1982 that works. Ike, like most of us, doesn’t start out a monster. He’s a good therapist, empathetic and compassionate, but unable to keep the neediness and insecurities of his own childhood at bay. As the decades progress though, and his manipulations become more overt, his actions less and less condonable, Rudd can’t make his mischievous doe eyes go dead as he transitions to outright baddie like Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.
When it comes to Will Farrell there’s no concealment at all, he’s Will Farrell. Subtlety is not his forte, and so as his life is subsumed, so does the comedy, with little to replace it. If this were mostly a comedy then that’d be fine, but a darker turn doesn’t quite go dark enough, can’t go dark enough. The comedy elements are very funny though, as you’d expect from this calibre of comedic actors, including Kathryn Hahn, paired with the writing of Georgia Pritchett. Hot off the heels of The Thick Of It, Veep, and current juggernaut, Succession, Pritchett is such a good writer, there’s a line about family being “a collection of people you owe an apology to” that I’ll be saving for Pesach. But in a story of boundaries being crossed, the blurring between genres feels a bit clunky, a bit awkward.
The one element they absolutely nailed though is the Jewishness. There’s a lot of it, and kudos to Pritchett for getting in a bunch of Jewish writers, it shows. Second bamitzvahs, rabbi recommendations, Ralph Lauren’s real name, seamlessly fit in the background whilst serving the narrative. As to whether you’d want to be served this narrative, I just can’t decide between three and four stars. I need to go ask my therapist.