Enlightened Review

The opening minutes are a woman melting down in an office corridor with her mascara running, screaming through a closing lift door, and Mike White spends the next eighteen episodes asking you to take her seriously anyway. Amy Jellicoe comes back from a retreat in Hawaii with a full vocabulary of self actualisation and no self awareness at all, is exiled to a basement data processing department at Abaddonn Industries, and slowly turns into a whistleblower.

The voiceover is the risk and the reward: Amy narrates her own life in the language of a wellness pamphlet while the camera shows you what is really happening, and the gap between the two is where the series lives. Laura Dern is fearless in it, playing someone who is right about the company and wrong about every person in her life. Diane Ladd, her mother on screen and off, gives the house scenes a silence Amy cannot talk through.

White casts himself as Tyler, and the episode called The Ghost Is Seen, which abandons Amy to follow him, is the best half hour HBO aired that year. It is a hard watch in the wrong mood, the first season is more cringe than argument, and it looks like nothing much, flat daylight and beige carpet. The second season is where it becomes great, and that is where HBO cancelled it.