Cabot McMullen On Creating Personal, Therapeutic Spaces for Apple’s ‘Shrinking’

When choosing a therapist, you want to make sure that you are comfortable in your new environment. You are about to talk about intimate feelings, problems, and frustrations. We sometimes, though, do not think about the people who occupy those offices on a daily basis. Therapists are the ones responsible for setting the tone with their communication but also with the physical surroundings they occupy. For Apple TV+’s openhearted and healing comedy, Shrinking, production designer Cabot McMullen wanted to pay homage to mood and character of Pasadena.

Does the California therapeutic experience differ than, say, New York City? For decades, we have had an idea in our head about the stigma of seeing a mental health professional, but that has been changing over the last few years, especially because of the pandemic. McMullen collaborated with Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Williams on how to personalize their offices, but the production designer’s approach was based on character and one real-life professional.

“We referenced a book called 50 Shrinks, and it’s essentially a coffee table photo book of different therapists in their environments,” McMullen says. “What we learned from this is that all the choices are very strategic and very specific. Some are to illicit a response or to be completely vanilla to not give the visitors a clue as to who they are visiting. There are different levels of engagement that are expressed through the design and furnishing of these environments. I realized that it was a design genre to itself. It’s very personal. Paul was based on a celebrity therapist named Phil Stutz. Harrison Ford visited Phil, and he got some pointers from him. Because he spent so much time with Phil–who actually has Parkinson’s–Harrison was able to pick up on some of the work-arounds Mr. Stutz uses in his daily practice. For instance, he has chairs that have very strong arms, so he can do push-ups if he needs to get up and move. With the writers and with Jason Segal, they wanted Paul to be a cypher in the way that characters walk into the space and you weren’t able to pick up any visual clues of who this guy was. By design, they wanted it to not be revealing. The first time you get a sense of who this guy is is when Alice visits his condo is Pasadena which he refers to his fortress of solitude. He’s kind of horrified that somebody is actually penetrating the privacy of his home there, and that’s where we really start to express him as a person. Nothing was arbitrary and everything was intentional.”

McMullen wanted to express a real love for this area of California. I joked with him that seeing the show was almost an advertisement for me to venture out west and see the different types of houses.

“We intentionally wanted to make Pasadena a character in this show, and the two big design genres in Pasadena are craftsman and midcentury, he says. “We found Jimmy’s house first, and we wanted that to be a craftsman. I thought about all the great, modern examples of architecture in the city, and we scouted a bunch of them. We found one near Eagle Rock off the 210 where Colorado is. There is a pocket of houses so that became our exterior, and we designed the interior to align with that. With out backstory, Paul found this building thirty or forty years ago and established his practice. He chose this building because he was appreciative of midcentury architecture. Paul is grooming Jimmy to take over the business. Jimmy and Gaby’s offices are like mini-me versions of Paul. We wanted to make sure Gaby’s office had a lot of fun colors and graphic since that matches her personality.”

McMullen has a infectious enthusiasm for architecture, and it became very evident that he wasn’t simply designing spaces to be pretty or modern. He wanted to fuse the idea of home and work together to show how someone’s work life bleeds into their home life and vice versa. There is a connective tissue from home to work, and it’s up to us to find that balance.

“In terms of Jimmy’s house, we scouted a lot of properties, and the interior of that house is really a combination of all of our favorite properties that we saw,” McMullen says. “Jason wanted there to be evidence of a keen interest in music and the arts, so if you take a closer look around there’s a lot of music references on the walls. We wanted Pasadena to be a character inside as well. Inside his kitchen, there are products from local dairies and local bookstores in the area. Our decorating team was very involved in creating layers there were specific to character and geography. The refrigerator door has actual local things pinned on it. We wanted to make sure that it was Tia’s house too–they built it together. There is a level of taste that is common between the house and Jimmy’s office. In the pilot episode, we really made a very conscious choice about how window treatments were put up, and the idea that Jimmy was mired in his grief with all the drapes down. We thought the craftsman vernacular would lend itself very nicely to keeping the place very dark and kind of cloistered. Over ten episodes, we would tell a story about a man who is coming out of darkness, and, as the episodes progress, he starts bringing in more light.”

Alice’s room is a space that we see a lot of times from the thresh hold as Jimmy is checking in on her. For a character that feels alone and feels like she is navigating her grief by herself, her room had to feel special. McMullen explains that once they are finished with a personal space, they like to bring people in to examine the details.

“The goal is to create a safe space for her where she could really express herself,” he says. “She’s got headphones on all the time, she’s listening to music, and she’s got a lot of pop culture references in here room. At the same time, we wanted it to have a sense of warmth. If you look around the room, there’s references to her grandparents and her aunts and uncles, so you see the diverse family. She comes from an Asian background and Lukita, who plays Alice, came in after we finished the set to add the final layer. We like to bring them to talk about character and present their perspective. We changed the bedspread so it was something that she was more comfortable with, and she had some wonderful ideas about the posters on the walls. I remember that she was very excited.”

If you were just walking around the office building, which therapist’s office do you think you’d walk into first? Are you attracted to the sophistication of Paul’s office, or did the pops of color in Gaby’s space appeal to you more? McMullen has been receiving a lot of notice for the spaces designed in the Apple darling. Maybe there could be a Shrinking pop-up, and we can all buy the furniture?

“[I would go into] Paul’s, for sure. He’s got some really fascinating pieces of furniture in there. I did my graduate studies in furniture design, and I was Vladimir Kagan’s assistant right out of school. I have a keen sense of design, particularly that period, and there’s some great pieces in Paul’s office. We get emails two or three times a week from all over the country asking where they can find a painting or a chair. We just had a decorator asking about the hounds tooth fabric on Paul’s sofa in his office, and this is a high-end decorator from San Francisco. People are loving all the stuff in that room, and I also love the chair behind Paul’s desk that he sits on.”

Shrinking is streaming now on Apple TV+.