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There’s a secret magic hidden just below the surface in the Land of Oz. No, it’s not the Grimmerie, nor even the many aspects of visual design crafted by the production team of “Wicked.” It’s the film’s score, which builds on Stephen Schwartz’s classic Broadway compositions and allows director Jon M. Chu to stretch and extend sequences so cinematic moments can really land. Composer John Powell created these musical bridges across numbers and across the Emerald City, but he got the job without having seen any version of “Wicked” before.
“I knew some of the songs, obviously,” Powell told IndieWire. “One of my first gigs in Hollywood was working on the songs of ‘The Prince of Egypt’ with Stephen [Schwartz] and Hans [Zimmer] and so I had to admit to him that I’d never seen the musical.”
But that outsider perspective was invaluable to the music team on “Wicked,” many of whom could trace their roots back to the original musical. Powell thinks of the film version of “Wicked” as an emotional reaction to the memory of the Broadway musical, which gave him the freedom to play with the existing material without being overburdened with its history.
“My gig was to try and suck up the emotional content of everything Stephen had done and make sure that it was working for this new movie,” Powell said. “It’s about learning the ‘Wicked’ language, but then applying that to cinema.”
What music needs to do on a stage and what music needs to do coming through Atmos speakers of a movie theater are decidedly different assignments. But Powell found that the existing musical language he was adapting was already pretty cinematic.
“The grammar of [Schwartz’s] harmonic language was very sophisticated. It doesn’t matter that he was using drums and bass and guitars and stuff. It’s still an extremely tight harmonically, emotionally-strung set of cordal and melodic leaps,” Powell said.
The keyword to maybe the entire “Wicked” score is “leap.” Octave jumps, particularly any time Elphaba sings “Unlimited,” are at the heart of the musical’s language, a deliberate echo of Dorothy’s “Somewhere” in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and evocative of a hero’s journey.
“When you leap like that, you’re searching for something. I think that language was built into Stephen’s language — if you go back and look at ‘Godspell’, it has that searching and optimism,” Powell said. “I think it was the shapes that I looked for at the time, and then the language that is different is the driving — how do you drive the thing, and also the intensity of the language, the density has to be lessened, and the melodic quotations have to be a little bit moved away from the dialogue.”
Powell acknowledges that it probably seems like the demands of the score were different, but he found key similarities in Schwartz’s musical style with his own — even if Schwartz isn’t keen on major thirds and Powell snuck some thirds on the bottom of cues. The real negotiation happened with managing melodic ideas from the songs so that the score could do narrative lifting without hitting the audience over the head with themes or pre-empt our thinking about the most iconic numbers in the Broadway show.
For instance, Powell tried building a little rhythmic riff on “Defying Gravity” into moments earlier in the film — when Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) meet at school — so it would work as a kind of musical engine for our Wicked Witch, driving her ever closer to her destiny.
“If nobody knew the song, we probably would have done it, probably it could have worked because it’s this little rhythmic motif that tells you this is an itch the character has and you can follow it through, but we were in a situation where [‘Defying Gravity’] was the thing; we’re balancing between people who have never seen the musical and people who have, so we had to be very careful about both sets,” Powell said. “It took seven reels to figure out how to do that last reel.”
Not that the reel with “Defying Gravity” wasn’t complicated in its own right. Film editor Myron Kerstein told IndieWire that the risks of stopping and starting what is arguably the best-known musical number from “Wicked” were incredibly high.
“By embracing these stops — which are really difficult because, first of all, it’s technically challenging to stop a song on the dime and then make that feel like you didn’t just pump the brakes too hard and you’re skidding across the tarmac, you know?” Kerstein told IndieWire. “[But we realized] a moment of connection was going to help the song build into an even bigger climax.”
Kerstein juggles multiple lines of action throughout the sequence, especially if you count the moments of Erivo and Grande interacting as a separate throughline from Erivo’s performance, and leans on Powell’s score extension of the number to move through them while trying to hold the audience as close to the drama of the moment as possible.
“Even before the war cry, we stopped the song again to have these building moments of everyone looking at [Elphaba], these beautiful, Spielbergian, ‘Jurassic Park’ moments of looking at this deity, but we’re pulling every lever editorially,” Kerstein said. “And then we have John Powell’s score in between trying to connect all the dots to feel the power of that completion of Elphaba’s origin story — when she puts on the hat and the cape and this moment of, you know, the superhero has been born.”
Kerstein relies on Powell’s musical bridges to keep the audience held close to the song, even when Elphaba isn’t singing, and uses little variations to ease us in and out of the number’s different musical modes — which range from theater-belting with a magical, Broadway-sized cape to purely cinematic, when Elphaba sees her younger self (Karis Musongole) reflected in the glass of the tower as she falls.
Conductor and executive music producer Stephen Oremus told IndieWire that the balance between Powell’s score and Schwartz’s original song was a high-wire act. “Stephen Schwartz’s song provides such an emotional and dramatic lift off for each moment— but then Powell was able to keep ramping up the tension with the chase sequences and the broom levitation— not to mention the stunning moment of the fall when she grabs the broom! The handoff back to the song is so natural as the song team builds the music back into Cynthia’s triumphant vocal,” Oremus said.
“The whole thing about ‘Defying Gravity’ is I’d done lots of analysis of bits and variants on it — and I think in the second movie, you’ll hear quite a lot more of where I’ve used the rhythmic nature of it,” Powel said. “By the time we get to it [in Film 1], there’s this feeling of withholding, I think, and I think that was the right thing to do. So, it’s really about flow and about being very careful to allow the story to unfold and never pushing in advance of it.”
In all his work on “Wicked,” the thing Powell wanted to avoid was being ahead of the audience in any way. So the carefully calibrated flow between the score and existing music ultimately came out of Powell using his outsider perspective to honor the love Chu holds for Schwartz’s original work.
“The dialogue between me, Stephen, and Jon was Stephen being right there, knowing exactly how everything worked, Jon holding onto his memory from 20 years of how he felt about [seeing the show], and me trying to bring the perspective of someone who’s watching the film for the first time,” Powell said. “It was very much a grinding of all those feelings until something very honest came out of it.”
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[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Shrinking” Season 2, Episode 12, “The Last Thanksgiving.”]
What is “Shrinking” without Jimmying? After two seasons watching Jason Segel’s frustrated therapist push his patients to stop moping on the couch and start moving on with their lives (in a desperate bid to make up for his own failures as an absentee dad), it looks like we’re about to find out.
Thank goodness.
In an essential, hard-earned gesture of humility, the “Shrinking” Season 2 finale sees its star asking his daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), for forgiveness, and in doing so, asks the audience for the same. He knows he screwed up. He knows he needs to say he’s screwed up, and he does so, thoroughly and earnestly.
While a solid climax to a season built around repairing Jimmy’s prominent character flaws, what makes the scene so fascinating is that it’s refuting the very premise of “Shrinking.” Here’s a show ostensibly about “a grieving therapist who breaks the rules, ignoring his training and ethics, to make huge, tumultuous changes in people’s lives,” and he comes to find out that a) he was driven to do so for the wrong reasons and b) in general, ignoring your ethics when trying to help people in crisis is a bad idea.
It’s far from revelatory, but it is correct and curious — the kind of speech you give in a series finale, not when you’re just getting started: Jimmy needed to own up to his mistakes, but now that he has… what’s “Shrinking” Season 3 going to look like?
A few clues can be found in how we got to Jimmy’s big moment (a moment, I must say, that’s almost immediately overshadowed by Paul’s big moment, which better earn Harrison Ford his first Emmy). Over the first half of Season 2, it was clear Bill Lawrence’s weepy Apple TV+ sitcom was keen on making amends. Most of the criticisms facing Season 1 were directed toward Jimmy, a character introduced swimming with sex workers in his backyard pool, high as a kite, while his teenage daughter slept inside. Some viewers struggled to see him as an affable authority figure: a dad who’s having a hard time, and a doctor who’s really trying to help his patient. Instead, he looked like what he was: a widower lost in a sea of grief, threatening to drag down the innocent people around him (or, as it were, shove them off a cliff).
So Season 2 course corrects. Early on, Paul (Harrison Ford) sits Jimmy down for a good talking to: He replaces Jimmy as Sean’s (Luke Tennie) primary therapist, which gives their codependent relationship much-needed distance, and he urges Jimmy to follow the guidelines of traditional therapy. Jimmy struggles with both directives, but notices improvements with Sean under Paul’s care. That plus the sudden arrival of a ghost from his past push Jimmy toward self-reflection: He has to confront Louis, the man responsible for his wife’s death (played by “Shrinking” co-creator and “Ted Lasso” Emmy winner Brett Goldstein), and then he has to confront his own behavior in the aftermath of that loss.
After nearing a relapse, Jimmy manages to reach out to Paul instead, which is how the finale begins. “You’re never going to forgive yourself for shitting the bed as a father until you bare your soul to Alice,” Paul says. “She might still blame you, but it’s the act of revelation that’s healing. […] It’s about you admitting what you did and why it was wrong.”
Understandably, it takes Jimmy a bit to accept the truth in Paul’s advice, but when he does, he doesn’t back down. He sits Alice down and explains exactly why he’s so wrecked right now. “Kid, every parent likes to believe that if something bad ever happens, they are going to rise to the occasion,” he says. “I certainly believed that about myself. I thought I was going to be the hero, that I would be your hero. And I was not. So when Louis came back into our lives, he was like this walking, talking reminder for me of how I just really let you down when you needed me the most.”
Jimmy says he can’t get past the idea that Alice is the amazing person she is “in spite of” Jimmy, not because of him; that he’s a terrible dad, and all he can offer is his sincere apology for not being “better.” Alice, proving the first part of his claim while rejecting the second, agrees that he fucked up after her mom died, but reminds him of all the good he did before then and how hard he’s been trying over the last year or so.
“After mom died, during the worst times, there was this one night when I was really tired after practice and I passed out on the couch,” Alice says. “In the morning, I woke up, and I was in my room. Even at your lowest, you still carried me upstairs. That let me know that you were still in there.”
Their heart-to-heart sagely addresses the issues between both characters while simultaneously alleviating the audiences’ concerns. Jimmy accepts responsibility for the mistakes we’ve seen him make, while Alice reminds us that those mistakes weren’t the sole defining aspects of her dad. It’s a slick bit of pseudo-retconning — highlighting previously overlooked aspects of his personality while trying to get past the prominent parts of which we’re all too aware or reframing Jimmy more than revising his past.
What the scene doesn’t do is speak directly to Jimmy’s newfound therapeutic techniques — not that it needs to. For one, in the previous episode, when Jimmy was on the verge of a relapse, Paul cautioned Jimmy against falling back into his old habits, even if they didn’t involve hard drugs and sex workers.
“So what are you gonna do?” Paul asks after Jimmy says he won’t be calling Paul for help. “Are you gonna find some other patient to make all better? Because I know you’re jonesing for a fix and this is your drug. But take it from somebody who knows: The drug wears off.”
Here, Paul is telling Jimmy that “Jimmying” isn’t the answer. He recognizes that Jimmy’s sudden need to fix his patients through fast, decisive action isn’t for their benefit but for his. Of course, that doesn’t stop Jimmy from seeking out Wally (Kimberly Condict) — a woman who found a neighbor’s dog and decided to keep him — and forcing her to return Bandit to his rightful owner. Once again, Jimmying works out for the best, but it doesn’t make Jimmy happy — not in a sustainable way, at least.
So… what does this mean for “Shrinking” Season 3? If Jimmying is dangerous and driven by Jimmy’s own demons, shouldn’t he stop? Shouldn’t his grand experiment be over? Probably not. After all, in addition to Wally, plenty of good has come from Jimmying. Sean wouldn’t be the happy small-business owner he is today without Jimmy’s abnormal interventions. Grace (Heidi Gardner) wouldn’t be free from her abusive husband (even if she also wouldn’t have shoved him off a cliff and spent time in prison). Dan (Mike C. Nelson) wouldn’t have been able to survive the stress of his best friend’s wedding, and Louis might not be here at all. (Season 2 ends with Jimmy showing up as Louis contemplates jumping in front of a train.)
Clearly, something about Jimmying is still working, even if “Shrinking” Season 2 went the extra mile to show what makes it so perilous. I’m guessing Jimmy will keep pushing boundaries in Season 3, albeit to less extremes (and likely under additional supervision from Paul). But without its weight hanging over “Shrinking,” Season 3 has room to be whatever it wants. As Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall notes, Bill Lawrence loves pivoting from a faulty high-concept premise to an easygoing hang-out comedy, and “Shrinking” thrives when its ensemble’s many interwoven arcs are shared more evenly. While I’ll always have my qualms about how it got here, now that Jimmy’s checked his baggage, maybe “Shrinking” can grow into its best self.
“Shrinking” is available on Apple TV+. The series has been renewed for Season 3.