Oh how I love HBO for investing in and championing in such great parts for actresses. Sooner or later, the economics of Hollywood inevitably devolves into work that indulges the pleasures of the target demo while leaving the rest of us who don’t fit into any marketing paradigm to fend for ourselves. As prime time continues to consume its own babies with reality TV madness, to which there appears to be no end, and nightly crime dramas that have to really hit the bottom of the barrel to find “fresh” stories every week, HBO and now Netflix, with House of Cards, is where the action is.
Enlightened doesn’t have what Girls has — it doesn’t have the lurid bait of sex with a different type of girl every week. It doesn’t have the “pretty one” or the “busty” one or the “lusty” one — it doesn’t have naked girls playing ping pong or masturbating. But what it does have is a unique, complex portrait of a woman — an ordinary woman who lives in, like, the south bay and works in a windowless office as a low level employee. She’s unmarried, lives with her mother, drives a beater car and is propelled through life absorbed in a sense of a higher purpose. The good thing about that is that she has hope and good intentions. The hilarious thing is that she’s awash in self-delusion. And you know, if one becomes too self-aware one is in danger of succumbing to cynicism and hopelessness.
Laura Dern as Amy is one of the best written female characters on TV — but the show Enlightened isn’t easy to fit into a box, certainly not the kind that appeals to the typical target demo, or any target demo. Women audiences like crime shows, reality shows, and crap (let’s face it). They aren’t really so into watching characters who remind them that we’re all getting older and as we do, if we’re women, the doors start closing.
Somehow Amy didn’t get the memo that she’s supposed to be irrelevant to society. She’s not young anymore, she’s not a mother — she doesn’t have any sort of point to her existence. But she’s here. To her mind, her higher purpose is to change the world — it is just misdirected. She could probably run for office if she knew the slightest thing about government. If the show gets renewed for another season she’ll probably get sued for taking down the corporation she worked for for 15 years. Or maybe she’ll actually try to enter government, which would be as funny in its own way as Veep, the other great HBO show.
So here’s to Mike White and Laura Dern, and to HBO — here’s hoping they give Enlightened another chance.
