In ‘Shrink,’ A Therapist-To-Be Tries Not To Go Insane

My years of Tim Baltz fandom are bookended by watching him read off index cards, a mundane act in less-skilled hands.

In 2011, he perform in a show called, “Sky’s the Limit (Weather Permitting),” a revue on Second City Chicago’s second-largest stage. One sketch cast him as Paul, a nervous young man on a first date with a character played by Mary Sohn (who was recently recruited for former Saturday Night Live writer-turned-cast member Michael O’Brien’s NBC sitcom pilot, produced by Seth Meyers and Lorne Michaels). Paul’s insecurities were so severe that he prepared for the date by writing out his responses on notecards; every time Sohn spoke, he reverted to his 3 x 5 inch roadmaps. Even though the situation was a tad absurd, Baltz conveyed genuine trepidation, and his endearing effort and eventual candor in the scene propelled him to Best Actor at the Joseph Jefferson Awards, the highest honor in Chicago theater.

While Baltz was playing Paul and other characters at night, he’d spend days with his friend, Ted Tremper, in the Second City complex’s Starbucks, collaborating on an 11-part web series about a medical school graduate, David Tracy (Baltz) who professionally rebounds with clinical therapy when denied a residency. Late in 2011, they shot their improvised, $211 television pilot, which Jean Doumanian Productions acquired before Shrink won Best Comedy Pilot and the critics award at the 2012 New York TV Festival. The episode’s only scripted line came from the disclaimer Baltz read from an index card to his non-paying, Craigslist-solicited patients: “I am required to inform you that I am not a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist or a registered therapist but that these therapy sessions are being tape-recorded to provide a record of the 1,920 supervised clinical hours to acquire such a license.”

Six months of development later, Baltz and Tremper pitched Shrink to eight outlets, and doomed Pivot TV made an offer. Each time new executives joined Pivot, they were enthusiastic about Shrink, until is biggest proponents—CEO Evan Shapiro and manager of original programming Kelsey Balance—decamped to Seeso, the NBC-owned streaming platform. “Once they left it was essentially dead at Pivot, but they owned it for like another year,” said Baltz—who has had guest roles on Veep, Parks and Recreation, and Better Call Saul, plus 18 episodes of Drunk History—in a recent phone interview. After much pleading, Pivot released the pilot. Baltz and Tremper, then a Daily Show producer in New York, were invited to pitch the show at Seeso (where Baltz is a series regular on Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ as Glenn, the doormat of an office manager). An eight-episode order arrived within the week.

At that point, Baltz was more equipped than ever to play David. He and Tremper approached the altruistic yet upwardly mobile character with a question: if his path to a medical career vanished, in Baltz’s words, “What kind his of tailspin is this guy going to be in?” Likewise, when Shrink was sold to Pivot, Baltz “completely destabilized my life” by moving to LA. “I guess there were some mirrors there…You really do have to stop the tailspin, take hold of your life, choose a new direction, and commit to it.” Beginning in June 2016, the duo wrote for eight-and-a-half weeks (Tremper left The Daily Show to join Baltz on the West Coast), and they returned to Chicago to shoot the episodes during September and October. Their team included executive producers Patrick Daly (August: Osage County) and Jonathan Stern (Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, Children Hospital), showrunner Chuck Martin (Arrested Development), and cinematographer Chris Teague (Obvious Child, People Places Things). Direction duties were split between Martin, Tremper, Graham Linehan (Father Ted, The IT Crowd) and Ryan McFall (Lady Dynamite, Search Party). Editing wrapped in mid-February, and all the episodes are now streaming on Seeso (watch the premiere for free below).

David is a friendly, intelligent, hardworking guy who was ready to settle into stable adulthood; losing his father as a kid was enough tumult for a lifetime. However, thanks to admissions nepotism (and getting dumped by his live-in girlfriend, who did secure a residency), he’s now unemployed and more than $500,000 dollars in debt, residing with his his mom and loan co-signer (Meagen Fay, Emma Stone’s mom in La La Land), stepfather (Joel Murray, Mad Men’s Freddy Rumsen and Bill Murray’s brother) and killjoy stepbrother (Kyle S. Moore). Enlisting the help of a pop-culture illiterate supervising therapist (Sue Gillan), who is the paradigm of professionalism, David starts presiding over sessions in his family’s rat-susceptible garage. Many of the patients he sees are portrayed by legendary Chicago improvisers, such as Late Night with Seth Meyers writer John Lutz, Inside Amy Schumer writer Tami Sagher, Annoyance Theatre founder Mick Napier (who directed Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert at Second City), and TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi, stars of the documentary Trust Us: This Is All Made Up (directed by Girls’s Alex Karpovsky), who have been described by Colbert this way: “One of these guys is the best improviser in the world. And the other one is better.” To earn money, David picks up part-time work at Happy Foods, where he stocks shelves overnight alongside his sweet and grounded best friend, Doug (Hans Holsen).

“I say that David is me at my best with my foot firmly in my mouth,” suggests Baltz, who says of himself, “The desire to help people has always been there. I was raised Catholic with a massive guilt streak, so I’m always kind of raking myself over the coals.” David is “so, so eager” that Baltz says he often “bypasses protocol” by incorrectly anticipating solutions. This often happens with extra-appointment field trips, such as browsing sex toys with one patient, arranging for another to confront her ex at a funeral, and providing a third with a confidence-boosting lesson in basketball court trash-talk (this produces the season’s best line: “You miss more shots than Jenny McCarthy’s kid”). “He’s trusting his instincts, but his instincts aren’t fully-formed because he’s in a new profession,” Baltz says.

Shrink is pleasant fun for seven episodes, ending with a risky, reeling cliffhanger that—though scripted—is evidence of Tremper’s main takeaway from watching thousands of Windy City improv shows. “The thing that makes Chicago improv special,” he says, is that “one doesn’t feel beholden to just focus on trying to get laughs. You can really go anywhere and do anything.” Tremper believes weaving tragedy throughout the narrative “gives—hopefully—a richness to the laughs that we get and it’s not just a bunch of people paling around having a great time.”

Stream Shrink now