Shrinking Knew Just What to Do With Derek

Shrinking’s cast is absolutely loaded. Jason Segel stars as a grieving therapist raising a teenage daughter in a role that allows him to stretch out every goofy and awkward bone in his lanky frame. Jessica Williams plays another therapist and is so good that there’s a whole separate article titled “Why Isn’t Jessica Williams a Much Bigger Star?” just waiting to be written. Freaking Harrison Ford is on the show, too, as the cranky head of the practice, and I genuinely don’t think you can have a better running bit than a character played by Ford using the phrase “raw dog” incorrectly multiple times in increasingly awkward situations. In the show’s currently airing second season, Brett Goldstein and Damon Wayans Jr. have popped up in what I can only assume is part of a scientific experiment to see how much charisma can be contained within a single show.

And yet, despite all those names I typed in that paragraph, all of whom are attached to layered characters capable of making you laugh or cry at any moment, we are going to focus on Derek. And also Ted McGinley, who plays Derek. These two men are thriving right now. 

Derek is a laid-back guy who lives in the house next to Segel’s character, Jimmy. Derek is cool and unflappable on a show where everyone else is flailing a bit. His wife, Liz, is a ball of chaos who bounces from one thing to the next and sometimes leaves a trail of destruction behind her. (Christa Miller is incredible at this, for the record.) His friends are always on the verge of falling to pieces. And through it all, at least until recently, Derek has just been, well, Derek, a steady and calming figure for everyone, including the audience. I love Derek. Everybody loves Derek. He’s an extremely good dude straight through to his bones, one who usually seeks the path of least resistance when presented with a problem. He has tremendous hair. A little earlier in the second season, Derek said this, which sums up his whole deal pretty nicely: 

Part of me wanted Derek to stay like this forever, a man kayaking unbothered through a hurricane. That’s not how Shrinking works, though. Or life, for that matter. Drama and adversity come for everyone at some point, and this season, one in which Derek was already getting significantly more screen time, they finally came for Derek.

The specifics are pretty straightforward. Liz was struggling with grown children and an emptying house and a lack of purpose. She said she was feeling “underwater,” and Derek’s very chill vibe wasn’t helping. He wasn’t hearing her. She ran into a handsome ex who runs a microbrewery in town. The handsome ex listened, they had lunch, and then they kissed. Derek was very upset by this when Liz told him, partly because of the kiss itself but also because he really hated that ex. It was time for Derek to do the thing everyone else on Shrinking can’t stop doing and look inward.

So he did, and he and Liz appear to be working it out, and despite my previous wishes that Derek remain a silly little rock on the show, it was hard not to be satisfied by it all. It was satisfying because it served as a good reminder that even the most stable among us have their own stuff to deal with. It was satisfying because the show found a way to unpack a thinly drawn character in a way that made him both sympathetic and flawed without stomping all over what made him fun to begin with. And it was satisfying because, like, good for Ted McGinley, man.

That’s the other part of this: Derek is played by Ted McGinley, one of television’s all-time great That Guys. He’s been at this forever. He was on Happy Days and The Love Boat. He was on Married … With Children. His IMDb credits would be as long as a baguette if you printed them out. It hasn’t always worked out great for him on the small screen, and yes, this is where we make the obligatory note that his late entry into a number of established series as their quality started dipping once earned him the unfortunate title of “The Patron Saint of Jumping the Shark.” But that was never really fair. In fact, you could actually make the argument that it was a badge of honor: Multiple long-running shows looked for an injection of vibes as they were lagging and all of them pointed at McGinley and said “Hey, there’s a guy who can turn this around.” There’s something kind of noble about that. (The hair didn’t hurt. It really is pretty divine.)

Either way, it makes what he’s doing on Shrinking feel pretty special. In 2024, after 40-plus years on television, including two episodes of a 1989 show called B.L. Stryker where he played a character named Mitch Slade (you really should scroll through his IMDb page sometime), Ted McGinley is getting a chance to shine as a fan favorite and increasingly nuanced character on a show that is stuffed with great performances. Again, freaking Harrison Ford is on this show. A few episodes ago, his character said the phrase “What, you want me to pull my pants down and make my ass clap?” and it took me nearly 900 words to even mention this incredible moment in television history because that’s how good Ted McGinley has been as Derek this season. He’s outshining Harrison Ford’s hypothetically clapping ass. If that’s not a sign of greatness, I don’t know what is.