Enlightened

Three months in a Hawaiian treatment center, a very public meltdown in a corporate hallway, and a demotion to the basement: that is where Enlightened begins. Laura Dern plays Amy Jellicoe, a mid-level executive at the Los Angeles conglomerate Abaddonn Industries who returns from rehab serene, soft-spoken, and absolutely certain she has been reborn. Her coworkers are less certain. Neither is her mother, her ex-husband, or the HR department that quietly moves her desk to a windowless room and assigns her to data entry.

Created by Mike White and Dern, the HBO series ran for two seasons and 18 episodes between October 2011 and March 2013. It looks like a workplace comedy and often plays like one, with fluorescent lighting, passive-aggressive meetings, and a boss named Dougie who seems to enjoy watching Amy flail. But the show is really a character study about the gap between wanting to be a better person and actually being one. Amy's awakening is sincere. It is also, at times, a new and more polished form of self-absorption. The writing refuses to resolve that tension in her favor.

Dern won a Golden Globe for the role in 2012, and the show drew some of the strongest reviews of any comedy on television in its run. It also drew small audiences, and HBO canceled it in March 2013. In the years since, its reputation has grown, and its fingerprints are visible on a generation of prestige comedies about difficult, searching women. Luke Wilson, Diane Ladd (Dern's real-life mother), Sarah Burns, Timm Sharp, and White himself round out a cast that makes the show's discomfort feel lived-in rather than performed. [edit]

Amy Jellicoe was a rising executive at Abaddonn Industries until she wasn't. An affair with her married boss, a confrontation that turned into a breakdown, and a three-month stay at a holistic treatment center in Hawaii later, she comes home with a new vocabulary and a new purpose. She wants to bring mindfulness and honesty to a company that runs on neither. Abaddonn's response is to move her to the basement and hand her a data entry job. Amy takes this as a test of her commitment rather than a punishment, which tells you most of what you need to know about her.

The world around her is drawn in deliberately unglamorous detail. Beige cubicles. Fluorescent lights. A boss, Dougie Daniels, who is petty and bored and seems to enjoy watching her struggle. A coworker, Krista Jacobs, who is meek enough to be pulled into Amy's orbit and smart enough to know better. And then there is Levi, her ex-husband, a fellow addict whose recovery has not gone as smoothly as Amy's, and Helen, her mother, who loves her and is exhausted by her in roughly equal measure. Diane Ladd plays Helen, and the fact that she is Dern's actual mother gives those scenes a charge the show never has to explain.

Season one follows Amy's re-entry into Abaddonn and the slow sharpening of her mission. What starts as a vague spiritual campaign becomes something more concrete when she stumbles onto evidence of corporate wrongdoing. With Krista's help, she begins quietly gathering documents. Meanwhile her personal life keeps interrupting: she reconnects with Levi, tries to make peace with Helen, and repeatedly mistakes her own impulses for higher wisdom. The season's arc is the collision between her idealism and a workplace, and a family, that reward cynicism and self-interest.

Season two picks up with the whistleblowing scheme in full swing. Amy and Krista have the files. What they do not have is a clean plan for getting them to a journalist without being caught, or a settled answer to the question the show keeps asking: is Amy exposing wrongdoing, or is she acting out a personal grievance and calling it justice? The season is shorter and more melancholy than the first, and it gives the supporting characters more room. Levi's recovery and relapse arc deepens. Helen gets scenes that stand on their own. The tone grows more reflective, and the show builds toward a conclusion that critics have argued about ever since. The series is less a conventional sitcom than a recovery memoir with a punchline, and its emotional register is unusually raw for an HBO comedy. The tagline gets at the central joke and the central pathos at once: she found inner peace, and now she is sharing it, whether you like it or not.[edit]