Where do we draw the line between the personal and the professional? Friends and neighbours? Is it OK to train a laser pointer on someone in the middle of a conversation? (The answer to that last one is, obviously, 'yes'; it's always funny.)

The matter of boundaries dominates the first two episodes in the second season of Shrinking, Apple TV's series starring Jason Segel, Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford as a trio of LA therapists whose practice has become the emotional pivot for patients, friends and family.

Created by Segel with Ted Lasso's Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, the show's first season was one of last year's true TV delights: an expertly written and performed comedy that see-sawed between grief, trauma and emotional catharsis, usually in the same hilarious beat.

It was also the best role Harrison Ford has had in almost a decade (Age of Adaline fans, I see you and feel you), showcasing the superstar's rarely seen ability to be light and incredibly goofy beneath his gruff, late-career exterior.

Even by its regular standards, Shrinking pulled an impressive tonal switch at the end of season one. Having spent the year processing the car-accident death of his wife, cognitive therapist Jimmy (Segel) was celebrating the marriage of his best friend Brian (Michael Urie) in a joyous, dance-filled celebration — all while the patient he'd counselled to leave her abusive marriage was busy pushing her husband off the edge of a ravine (yup, it was a literal cliffhanger).

It was pretty clear that Jimmy's unorthodox involvement in his patient's lives — which had become a way for him to deal with his own issues — was coming back to bite him.

Hard boundaries, or none at all?

When season two opens, the attempted murderer, Grace (SNL's Heidi Gardner), is in the slammer awaiting trial, and Jimmy is waking up screaming. His colleague and professional mentor, Paul (Ford), knows Jimmy has become too close to his patients — especially Sean (Luke Tennie), the young veteran who Jimmy has taken in to live with him.

It's a clash of therapy styles, to say the least. But might Paul, whose sarcastic defences Ford captures so indelibly, have too many boundaries?

Although the grizzled therapist has faced up to his Parkinson's diagnosis and reconnected with his estranged family, he's afraid to admit that the romance with his neurologist (the great Wendie Malick) might be the real deal. "I love you," he tells her in one scene, to which she replies (recalling one of Ford's most famous screen moments): "Well, that sucks."

Jimmy, meanwhile, is tangled up in an affair with his other colleague Gaby (Jessica Williams), a situation made all the more complicated by the fact that she was his late wife's best friend. It seemed like season one's lone dubious story choice, but thanks to Segel's and Williams's willingness to explore the mess, it's starting to pay off thorny dividends.

Just as she's taking up her new college professorship, she's "caught feelings" from her inter-office fling with Jimmy — a pickle that Williams continues to play with an endless supply of truth-laced zingers.

"I'm such a pathological caretaker," she tells one of her students, "that if you show me any train-wreck of a man, I will just jump in that pool like some Black lady Michael Phelps, every single f**king time."

Punchlines and emotional punches

One of the great feats of Shrinking is its ability to juggle so many emotional registers in the space of short scenes, and to ensure all of its characters get their due within the brisk running time.

While the main character drama plays out, we spend equally devoted spells with Sean and Jimmy's endearingly nosy neighbour, Liz (Christa Miller), as they launch their food-truck business; Jimmy's teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) and her upcoming driver's test (especially nerve-wracking, given her mother's fate); and himbo MVP Derek (Ted McGinley), whose interactions with his lovelorn son (Gavin Lewis) makes for some of the episode's funniest asides. ("Now remember, Alice is just a friend," he tells his sad-boy kid, "not someone whose skin you wanna wear.")

Writers Rachna Fruchbom and Annie Mebane (whose vomit-soaked season one episode was a highlight) keep the punchlines — and the emotional punches — coming, while director Randall Keenan Winston and Australian cinematographer John Brawley's sunny compositions belie the mania running beneath LA's affluent suburbs.

It'd be easy for a show like this to lean into outright flippancy or, conversely, stray into cuddly California hope-core — the kind threatened by Benjamin Gibbard and Tom Howe's soaring theme song. But the writing is so sharp and the performances so skilled that Shrinking avoids tonal whiplash, consistently finding the joke without diffusing the drama.

Take the exchange in which Paul's attempts to counsel Jimmy keep getting punctured by the fact that the latter has just lost a couple of teeth.

"It's not that kid's job to heal you," barks Ford.

"He'th my biggethht thuccctheth thtory," comes Segel's reply.

As always, the humour is mixed up with the darkest, messiest stuff. There's a moment toward the end of episode one that's characteristic of the show's psychic push and pull, as Jimmy and Alice get hit with something that threatens to undo all of the work they've put in to process their grief.

Like most of us, these characters are never far from their next emotional blow — nor their next breakthrough.

Season 2 of Shrinking is streaming now on Apple TV.