Review: The Shrink Next Door Is a Monotonous Study of Co-Dependence

The Shrink Next Door rapidly hops between decades but feels like it moves at a crawl, dulling the myriad charms of its leading cast.

The Shrink Next Door
Photo: Apple TV+

After a heated exchange with a belligerent client in the first episode of The Shrink Next Door, Marty Markowitz (Will Ferrell) hides between drapes at the textile business that he inherited from his late parents. His sister, Phyllis (Kathryn Hahn), finds him fending off a panic attack by clenching the cloth between his teeth. “What are you so scared about?” she asks. “You’re in charge now. You’re the boss. Bosses don’t chew the fabric.”

Marty’s crippling anxiety dates back to, at least, his bar mitzvah, where it confined him to a bathroom stall for much of the party. That and other issues have left Marty insecure, resigned to unhappiness, and desperate for company and validation. Phyllis urges Marty to go to therapy and refers him to Dr. Ike Herschkopf (Paul Rudd), psychiatrist to Manhattan’s elite, who welcomes him with open arms and outsized charm.

Adapted from a Wondery and Bloomberg podcast, The Shrink Next Door chronicles the increasingly bizarre relationship between Marty and Ike from the ’80s to the 2010s. Jolted to life by Ike’s enthusiastic attention, Marty invites his therapist in—to his personal affairs, his work, and, in time, his immense inheritance. Ike seizes the opportunity and tends to Marty like a parasite, milking his wealth not just with therapy fees, but by accepting a meaningless consulting job at the man’s company, practically taking as his own the Markowitz summer house in the Hamptons, and co-creating a vanity foundation funded by Marty’s nest egg.

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The series jumps back and forth to various points in its nearly three-decade arc, and while it announces the current year with intertitles and gradually whitens the hair of its characters in later periods, the constant leaps quickly erode any sense of time. The monotony of Marty and Ike’s relationship only exacerbates our disorientation. Over the years, they have similar conversations in therapy sessions with familiar “breakthroughs,” Ike routinely and abruptly cuts off sessions because “we’re out of time,” and he reliably assuages Marty’s rare concerns about their joint ventures by assuring him that he’d do anything for him. The repetition is, perhaps, meant to evoke the déjà vu that accompanies both arrested development and manipulative relationships, but it can all be exhausting to watch.

Marty, Phyllis, and Ike feel, for the most part, like symbols rather than people, their utility to the plot superseding the workings of their inner lives. Ferrell, Hahn, and Rudd lay the Jewish New York accents on thick, and dialogue is peppered with Yiddish and references to their religion. But we’re largely locked out of what Judaism, and Jewishness, means to them.

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When the show’s creators give the actors something meatier to work with, their performances are at turns wrenching, hilarious, and biting. In one of The Shrink Next Door’s finer and subtler moments, Marty and Ike are playing basketball when the latter gets a phone call and learns that a family member with whom he shared a complicated relationship has passed away. At a loss, Ike rips the collar of his tank top, as per the Jewish mourning practice of kriah, expelling a lifetime of grief and anger before brushing it aside to get back in the game.

If the show’s writing falls short, its cinematography, including manipulations of foreground and background, proves defter in its conveyance of character. In the second episode, “The Ceremony,” Marty is at the center of a hora, and he’s seen being lifted in slow motion toward the ceiling atop a chair. But as Ike is prone to seizing the limelight for himself, we see him rise up from behind Marty on a chair of his own, and the camera’s focus shifts to him. In episode five, “The Family Tree,” Ike talks about the difficulties of his youth while sitting by a fireplace with Marty, the flames reflecting off his glasses embodying his buried-down wrath.

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Once Marty commits himself fully to Ike, Phyllis takes a backseat for much of the series—a shame given Hahn’s singular ability to shift from impish scene chewing to affecting understatement. Instead, we receive intriguing, if scattered, glimpses into the psyche of Ike, who betrays a pattern of exploiting clients. Through a conversation he has with his wife, Bonnie (Casey Wilson), we learn that Ike grew up with modest means, the son of a withholding Holocaust survivor. This explains Ike’s dejection in “The Family Tree” when Marty introduces him to his Hamptons neighbor (Jonathan Emerson), whom he describes as “old money.” Marty fails to understand that, to those lacking generational wealth, any money inherited is ancient. In that moment, Ike is at his most relatable: He sees in Marty a ticket to the New York high society he’s desperate to join, the chance to one day bequeath old money to his kids.

And so Ike colonizes Marty’s mind and world, paving over tangles of phobias and fixations to build his dream home in the Hamptons, excising from it whatever sentimental value it holds for Marty. The one new addition to the house that truly belongs to Marty, a koi pond that he creates with Ike’s approval, serves as both a secluded oasis and the site of Marty’s exile. The koi ultimately catalyze Marty’s catharsis, a particularly satisfying pouring out of deserved bile. But the release comes too slowly, with far too much bobbing around in the buildup.

Score: 
 Cast: Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Kathryn Hahn, Casey Wilson, Cornell Womack, Robin Bartlett, Sarayu Blue, Christina Vidal Mitchell  Network: Apple TV+

Niv M. Sultan

Niv M. Sultan is a writer based in New York. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Drift, Public Books, and other publications.

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