The Shrink Next Door could’ve used a script doctor

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This article was published 19/11/2021 (1452 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I like it when comedians go dark. There’s an unexpected jolt in watching nice-guy Jason Bateman turn jerky in The Gift or seeing fast-talking Robin Williams get creepy and quiet in One-Hour Photo. I can’t abide the lazy comedies Adam Sandler makes with his cronies, but give the man a serious writer, a real director and a character driven by compulsion or rage, and he’s dynamite.

Recently, longtime funnymen Steve Martin and Martin Short imparted a sad poignance to their light-comic turns in Only Murders in the Building, and Melissa McCarthy let her brash comic persona become vulnerable in Nine Perfect Strangers, to potent effect.

The stereotype of the sad clown has been around for a while, but lately comedy has started to self-consciously examine its own foundations. Stand-up acts like Hannah Gadsby, James Acaster and Gary Gulman have laid bare the ways humour can be connected to trauma, damage and depression.

Sometimes a comedian’s insecurity — or even self-hatred — gives them an edge that can be channelled into highly uncomfortable comic material. At other times, a comedian goes straight-faced into difficult and emotional drama.

Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd, who’ve paired up before in goofball comedies like Anchorman, are testing some tricky territory in The Shrink Next Door, an intriguing but unsatisfying new limited series on Apple+ TV. This fact-based dramedy focuses on the decades-long relationship between Marty Markowitz (Ferrell) and his unscrupulous therapist, Dr. Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf (Rudd).

Marty, who runs his family’s New York fabric company, is overwhelmed, anxious and easily bullied. His sister Phyllis (the always terrific Kathryn Hahn) suggests an appointment with Dr. Ike, who seems, at least at first, like a miracle worker. He shows Marty how to assert himself — with everyone except Dr. Ike, that is. “He’s my psychiatrist, my business partner and my best friend,” Marty is soon announcing with an oblivious sort of happiness.

While Dr. Ike likes to bill himself as “unconventional,” it’s clear he’s a tangle of bad boundaries and queasy ethics, as he insinuates himself into every aspect of Marty’s life. Dr. Ike also talks about self-awareness and self-esteem, but he himself is a murky mess of self-doubt. When he convinces Marty to have another bar mitzvah, supposedly to exorcise Marty’s bad memories of the first time around, it’s clear this is all about Ike’s own bar mitzvah-related issues.

The series itself is unsure how to draw the line between dark drama and desperate comedy. These modes can act as opposite sides of the same knife, all the better for cutting into difficult truths. But here they tend to cancel each other out.

This muted tone is even more disappointing given the supremely strange and sad nature of the real-life source material. Based on a true-crime podcast by veteran journalist Joe Nocera, The Shrink Next Door deals with the issue of therapeutic abuse, demonstrating the particular cruelty of Ike and Marty’s case, which combined what passed as caring treatment with predatory, manipulative and isolating behaviour, to devastating effect.

Rudd does pretty well, partly because much of what he’s doing is close to his comedic roles, knocked off balance a couple of degrees by Ike’s narcissism and neediness. Recently announced as People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, Rudd also benefits from the slight eeriness of his preternaturally youthful good looks.

Here we can see his smooth-surfaced charm curdle into a desperate desire to impress. Just watch Dr. Ike’s patter as he works the room at a party. It’s pure shtick, which can seem comic but here feels weaponized.

Ferrell is less lucky. A scene in which the 40-year-old Marty struggles through his bar mitzvah prep alongside an extremely precocious 12-year-old girl feels a little too much like Elf, where Ferrell loomed with comic awkwardness over all the other elves.

In some ways, Marty seems like a recognizable Ferrell man-child, a character that can be played for laughs or for pathos. In trying to do both, Ferrell gets stuck in the middle. There’s a scene where Marty is lip-synching the song Gloria into a paint roller, which seems like way-too-cutesy comic-montage material, and other sequences where he’s earnestly overcompensating with his Sad Will Ferell face.

The eight-episode series has its moments, but it struggles to find its tragicomic tonal spot. It’s not so much “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry” in The Shrink Next Door. You probably won’t do much of either.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca