Enlightened (MA). Creators: Mike White, Laura Dern. Starring: Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Sarah Burns, Luke Wilson, Mike White. 20 episodes, 30 minutes
In the opening scene of this gloriously squirmy HBO comedy, health and beauty executive Amy Jellicoe (Dern) undergoes a humiliating emotional breakdown on the open floor of her company's luxurious corporate offices. Flash forward, and she has just returned from a stint at a new-age treatment clinic called Open Air. She is a changed woman. The extent to which this change amounts to a transformation is an open question.
Enlightened explores Amy's attempts to integrate back into her old life, with her newly acquired positivity intact. Her resolve is tested by her emotionally distant mother, Helen (Ladd); by her employers who don't want anything to do with her, and shunt her off to a tedious data-entry job in the basement; and by her drug-and-alcohol abusing ex-husband Levi (Wilson), with whom she shares a painful past.
The series fits the oeuvre of 'comedy of discomfort' (e.g. The Office) in which the humour stems from characters' lack of self-awareness, and elicits a response that sits agonisingly between laughter and pity. It parodies the self-focused philosophies of the cult of self-help and reveals how they can turn a person like Amy into a monster. Amy's obliviousness to the complexity and hidden pains of others is at the heart of Enlightened's discomforts.
Dern's performance is a tour-de-force. Her ingratiating, girlish mannerisms reveal her 'recovery' as something more like a regression. Everything from her flirty manipulation of her sweetly geeky colleague Tyler (played by the show's co-creator and head writer White) to the looks of excruciating pity she throws at those who are not lucky enough to be as enlightened as she is reflect the character's utter self-absorption.
At times Amy's naivety is comical. She joins Twitter, gleefully types 'this is my first twit!', then stares glumly at the unmoving '0' that designates the number of people following her. But it also manifests itself as awful delusions of grandeur. Series two concerns her attempts to turn whistleblower against her unethical employers. She sees herself as a moral crusader and is seemingly unaware of the extent to which she is motivated by revenge.
She compares this task — with utmost sincerity, and to a pregnant colleague no less — to childbirth. The recipient of this inanity is Krista (Burns), Amy's former assistant who is now making her own way up