Product Description
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Enlightened centers on Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a 40-year-old
woman who returns home to California after a month’s stay at a
holistic facility, a result of having a mental
breakdown at work triggered by her self-destructive ways. Amy
returns to her old life with a new cultivated approach and
perspective, which includes daily meditation and exhorting the
power of self-help and inner healing. Though Amy wants to be an
“agent of change” in the world, the people who know her best are
skeptical of her latest intentions. Also stars Luke Wilson, and
Diane Ladd.
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The pay-TV landscape just keeps getting better as the 21st
century matures, and the medium along with it. Shows like
Homeland, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and The Big C on Showtime,
Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and The Killing on AMC,
Justified and Sons of Anarchy on FX, and now Enlightened on the
knockout HBO roster prove that premium cable is thriving in both
the broadcast and home theater markets. As in the four Showtime
offerings mentioned above, a devoted focus on an enigmatic,
dynamic, yet seriously damaged female lead is the absorbing
narrative focus of Enlightened. Laura Dern plays Amy Jellicoe, a
high-powered executive at a soulless high-tech consumer products
corporation who has a high-end freak-out at work after the
dissolution of a disastrous affair with her married boss. The
title and premise reveal themselves in nifty short order after
this jarring prologue as Amy retreats to a specialized rehab
facility in Hawaii, where she finds peace, tranquility, and a
spiritual center that she brings back to her corporate world and
the many stressors that are the result of Amy being Amy. The
premiere episode packs a lot into 30 minutes, as does each
subsequent installment by doling out backstory details about
Amy's life pre- and post-meltdown. One of the triumphs of the
absorbing mix of comedy and seriousness in Enlightened is the
fact that its satirical core remains separate from its genuinely
affecting character details and too-close-for-comfort
observations about modern life. Though she appears to have made
an honest change in her spiritual world, Amy is still deeply
screwed up. The interactions that unfold with her family and
coworkers continually try her newfound sense of well-being,
illustrating that everyone's grasp of reality is always tenuous
and subjective regardless of any sense of personal enlightenment.
Amy's snippets of narration play like a self-help regimen ed
directly at the viewers; her affirmations are not just for her
own benefit, they're also meant to bring us into the fold on her
ongoing quest for illumination. "You can change," she says to
herself, "and you can be an agent of change." Are you listening?
Enlightened was developed (along with Dern) and written by Mike
White, who also plays one of Amy's coworkers, Tyler, a marginally
creepy, socially challenged misfit she gets stuck with in the
bowels of a corporate IT hellhole. White has created a number of
intriguing pieces of work as a writer, director, and actor (The
Good Girl, Chuck and Buck, School of Rock, and episodes of Freaks
and Geeks among them). His off-kilter sensibility is at its peak
in Enlightened, which is restricted and enhanced by the concision
of its format and the pithy fine points of plot that are
simultaneously amusing, disturbing, and spot-on in their
observational tone. The cast also includes Diane Ladd as Helen,
Amy's mother (Dern's too), who's bewildered and more than a
little exasperated when Amy moves in with her ready to heal
something that Helen wants to stay broken. Luke Wilson plays
Amy's ex-husband Levi, a man-child in love with drugs who Amy
also wants to help by providing healing that he doesn't really
want. All of these people and the many other characters in Amy's
life that the show deftly introduces and weaves into its dramatic
structure mostly keep their own counsel---just like people in the
real world do. But when they talk it's important to listen
closely. The 10 brisk episodes continue to reveal more about them
all as the web of Amy's connections and the roots of her psychic
vision quest unravels. Enlightened is the kind of show that
requires active viewing and demands that attention be paid in
order to get up to speed with its conceptual center. But once
hooked, nirvana in the form of a half-hour TV show is not far
behind. --Ted Fry
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Set Contains:
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* Inside the Episodes
* 4 Audio Commentaries with Laura Dern, Mike White, Diane Ladd
and more!
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