How ‘Shrinking’ Composer Tom Howe Expanded The Music For Season 2 And Scored That Final Brett Goldstein Scene – Sound & Screen TV

The last time Tom Howe spoke with Deadline about his musical compositions for the Apple TV+ comedy series Shrinkingthe composer expressed the hope he would be able to further unpack the opening theme song, “Frightening Fishes” in a Season 2.

Season 2 arrived on the streamer in October 2024, and Howe got his chance to do that unpacking at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Television.

“The nice thing was about going into Season 2, you can do a lot of variations on the theme and also introduce new themes with different characters and things like that,” Howe said on the show’s panel. “And there also was an opportunity for some longer cues. So that also gives more chance of that kind of, you know, up picking of things and trying different variations and things in different modes here, and things like that.”

Given the baseline theme song (which Howe co-wrote with Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie) having been already been established, Howe was able to elaborate for Season 2, and he added new themes for Harrison Ford’s and Christa Miller’s characters, respectively the mentor and neighbor to Jason Segel’s Jimmy.

“There was a bit more to play with,” he said. “I think the longest cue in Season 1 might have been about a minute maybe, and the last cue in the Thanksgiving [episode] was five minutes long. Bit more time to kind of say what you can say, yeah, absolutely.”

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Howe worked closely with Miller — who also serves as a music supervisor on the show with Tony Von Pervieux — to set up a final, emotional scene between Brett Goldstein’s Louis, the man who killed Jimmy’s wife and Alice’s mom in a car accident, and Jimmy on Thanksgiving.

RELATED: ‘Shrinking’ Music Supervisors Christa Miller And Tony Von Pervieux Talk Episode 7 Needle Drops And Tease ‘Something For Everyone’ In Finale

“I did have a long conversation with Christa and Tony. There was going to be a song at the end, so I sort of knew where I had to arrive, and I went back from there, actually, to when he was in the coffee shop when he’s told he can’t go to Thanksgiving, and that’s what makes him decide to go to the station,” Howe said. “I decided to play the entire sequence almost like a montage, with the same theme actually running, which is the main theme of the show. So it starts off in a minor key, and then it moves through keys and modes as it goes along for the five minutes. And then when the song starts, the score is still in, actually, and the song’s filtered, and then it turns into very heavy sounds because the train is approaching and that sort of ramps up to give you that feeling of when the [tension] is whether he’s gonna jump or whether he’s gonna get pulled back in.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.