A Good Couch Session: How Enlightened Became My New Therapist

HBO's Enlightened, now six episodes into its first season, continues to be something extremely special and unlike anything else on TV. Creator Mike White, who also plays Tyler, the show's quiet and lovable IT geek (and possible romantic interest, we hope), describes each episode as a "tone poem" or "meditation" on a different subject. Kudos to the executives at HBO for not hearing the words, "So, I'm thinking of making a tone poem..." and opening a trap door beneath White's feet. Because the key to the show's disarming power is precisely in the long, wordless beats during which Amy, the damaged protagonist played by Laura Dern, contemplates everything that led up to that moment, the emptiness of the now, and braces for everything to come. Through all of her shortcomings—and there are many—she is always motivated by an impulse to better herself and the world around her. White skillfully oscillates us between revulsion and attraction to Amy in a way that doesn't feel manipulative; rather, my relationship to Amy reminds me at times to those I have with certain friends, family members, or even—at my worst moments—myself. And then I start thinking about my own life during those quiet stretches or voice-over monologues. And that can get kind of heavy! Despite all its New Age mockery, and all my inbred cynicism, I'll often walk away from an episode of Enlightened feeling spiritually recharged, like a good therapy session. That's something.

There was a scene in this week's episode, "Sandy," where Amy's mother Helen (Diane Ladd), a retentive and childish woman who shows her daughter all the tenderness of a block of granite, assesses Amy's sudden friendship with Sandy (Robin Wright), a New Age flake Amy met in recovery. Helen reminds her daughter that, as a child, Amy always had a new best friend; eventually there would be a falling out, though, and another one would come along. Of course, it's not just an innocent recollection: It's ammunition. It's a mother inflicting psychic damage by reinforcing her daughter's own worst thoughts about herself: That Amy throws herself shamelessly at relationships, but is ultimately incapable of sustaining one. Then we sit with Amy as the words eat into her core like sulphuric acid. That scene, so quiet, was absolutely devastating. But Amy always brushes herself off, smiles wide, gets enthused about a butterfly or the plight of migrant farm workers in Far East Asia, and we're right back with her again. She's charming that way.

A TV.com commenter by the name of Selbot recently articulated things about this show that had been floating around in my head, but that I had not yet fully formulated. Selbot wrote, in part:

This show is a brilliant portrayal of the failure of the American Dream to fulfill us. I think that the characters, regardless of how successful ([Amy's former secretary] Krista) or unsuccessful (Tyler), they all share an emptiness that I think resonates with people like me who feel like there's more to life than this ad culture tells us we want. I love more that this show is really trying to get the viewer to reconcile Amy's utter wankiness with her genuine desire to better herself and the world around her—it's actually imparting some humility to the viewer. This show is actually making me contemplate philosophical ideas, inspiring me to rethink how I approach issues in my life, and crazily enough, open up my heart.

I agree, wholeheartedly. There's a general air of melancholy that drifts through this series, and even the characters that should be happy, like Krista, promoted to manager and with a baby on the way, seem dissatisfied with where they are in their lives. Only Dougie (Timm Sharp, who you may recognize from Undeclared), the tool of a manager who runs Amy's Cogentiva department, has the gift of stupidity to shield him from life's slings and arrows. Never has someone so loud and threatening been so utterly ineffectual, and his scenes with Amy are usually pretty hilarious. On the other end of the man-child spectrum is Levi (Luke Wilson, in his best role in years, if not ever). Levi is extremely smart, still handsome, and completely adrift. He is addicted to drugs, which are filling some void—but we still don't what the void is or how he got there. The episode called "The Weekend," where Amy and Levi go on a rafting expedition, might actually be my favorite episode so far, simply in the way that it stripped away everything and put these two characters, once deeply involved and now hovering at two far away points in the universe, under glass, for us to observe them like insects. To make something like that work, you need a combination of stellar writing, acting and direction; this did, and the episode felt whole and sad and real to me. When we got to Amy's moment of defeat, when she abandoned the campsite to join Levi on a hunt for cocaine after she threw his stash in the river, the effect it had on me was profound. It hurt. It felt so human. It actually made me cry. And Enlightened often does.