Shrinking, the TV series about Jason Segel’s Jimmy, a grieving psychotherapist who can’t stop telling patients what he really thinks, seems pretty innocuous on paper. From Frasier to In Treatment to Sex Education, there’s no shortage of TV dramas about dysfunctional therapists. What marks Shrinking out from the crowd is the presence of Harrison Ford, who plays Jimmy’s octogenarian mentor. Here we see a Hollywood megastar getting high on edibles, wrestling with his failures as a father and trying to keep a lid on his Parkinson’s symptoms. Though Segel shares top billing with Ford, the latter is the main draw and gets all the best lines.
Paramount’s 1923, showrunner Taylor Sheridan’s prequel to Yellowstone, similarly draws on Ford’s elder statesman status as it depicts a ranching family’s efforts to maintain their wealth and status during the Great Depression. Ford’s co-star is Helen Mirren, another octogenarian actor who previously appeared with him in the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast. Set in Montana, 1923 is a classy drama that makes high art of its protagonists’ craggy features along with their penchant for brutality.
So what should we make of the elders of cinema plying their trade on the small screen? In years gone by, the stars of Old Hollywood would have balked at moving into TV. To do so would have been a sure sign their career was on the rocks, though Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Collins both shrugged off the snobs in the 1980s when they joined the casts of The Thorn Birds and Dynasty respectively. Collins became a bigger star as Dynasty’s uber-bitch Alexis Carrington than she’d ever been as a twentysomething under contract at 20th Century Fox starring in films such as Land of the Pharaohs and The Opposite Sex. Conversely, Charlton Heston’s toe-curling turn on Dynasty spin-off The Colbys had the opposite effect, all but killing off his career. After that, the actor stuck to comedy cameos and NRA rallies.
Today’s TV landscape clearly looks different for Hollywood stars wishing to branch out, offering more variety and, for the most part, a better class of drama than of yore. Think of Meryl Streep, who appeared in the 2019 second series of Big Little Lies and, later on, gleefully hitched a ride on the hit Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building. Or Gary Oldman, who has played Dracula and Churchill on the big screen, as an ageing spook in need of a wash in TV’s Slow Horses. Or Kathy Bates playing the septuagenarian attorney in Matlock, perpetually underestimated because of her age. Or Sly Stallone making his TV debut as a veteran mobster in Tulsa King, another series from Taylor Sheridan. In fact, Sheridan, who recently cast Kevin Costner and Billy Bob Thornton in Yellowstone and Landman, seems to be on a one-man mission to lure veteran male actors out of retirement.
Few of these ageing stars could be accused of slumming it in what are mostly big-budget productions, even if they have a job on their hands getting noticed in the age of too much telly. There’s little sense of them dining out on past glories, either. When Jeff Bridges, big-screen star of The Fisher King and The Big Lebowski, was persuaded back to TV to play an elderly ex-CIA agent who struggles to put his socks on in the mornings, it was for FX Networks’ unequivocally titled The Old Man. In Shrinking, Ford is required to lean into his elderly status and depict his character’s struggle with his encroaching infirmity. Compare that to the 2023 Indiana Jones reboot Dial of Destiny, where, aged 80, he reprised his whip-cracking, stunt-happy action hero.
That meaty TV roles are being written specifically for oldsters can only be good news – it’s certainly an improvement on putting them out to pasture in late middle age, as Hollywood was wont to do until recently – but currently it is still men getting the lion’s share of these parts. In acting, as in life, ruthless ageism has always disproportionately affected women, a situation expertly lampooned in Amy Schumer’s sketch Last Fuckable Day, in which three actors – Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette – celebrate one of their number’s last day of being “believably fuckable” in the eyes of the entertainment industry.
Another factor driving the acting old guard to look to TV for work is that the movie industry is still feeling the financial hit of Covid-19 and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes. Budgets remain tight and megahits are now few and far between – last year, Snow White, Mickey 17, Christy, After the Hunt and the Dwayne Johnson vehicle The Smashing Machine all bombed at the box office. Meanwhile, viewers have the option of waiting until the big movies turn up on streaming services, which is sometimes a matter of days after the cinema release.
Little wonder, then, that older actors want in on TV, where they can be seen by those viewers unwilling to drag themselves to the multiplex and where they can spend time developing complex characters. Meanwhile, the shows in question get gravitas, experience and star quality in return. Right now, there is much to be gloomy about in the creative industries, but this is a golden age for the pensionable actor for whom fresh glories and a third act beckon.
Fiona Sturges is an arts writer
