HBO’s Enlightened

Originally published in 2013 for Scapegoats and Panaceas.

I’m in love with HBO’s show Enlightened, now in its second season. Mike White’s Enlightened airs every week after Girls, but has never seen a quarter of the hype generated by Lena Dunham’s show. Starring Laura Dern as the painfully insufferable Amy Jellicoe—a blond, forty-something, divorced woman eking out her cog-in-the-wheel existence at a generic corporation in the bland southern California city of Riverside—it’s pretty easy to understand why Enlightenment has managed to fly so far under the radar.

It certainly doesn’t, as many have argued about Girls and FX’s Louie, manage to challenge the conventions of the sitcom genre. But I think it manages to pull off a feat that is almost more rare in the world of television—striking a gracious balance between scathing humor and raw idealism, evoking empathy for the show’s most awkward, unbearable characters. It manages, in Emily Nussbaum’s words, to “advocate emotional openness, even when it hurts.”

In a nutshell, it’s “a satire of feminine New Age do-gooderism that shares the values of all it satirizes.” Its message is both intensely self-deprecating but also incredibly compassionate––poignantly making the case that we humans are most lovable as our most floundering, most flawed, most unintentionally comical versions of ourselves.