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Enlightened Season 2 |OT| Even agents of change get cancelled sometimes.

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A

anaron

Member
RatskyWatsky said:
That list is sort of weird (Orphan Black and Mad Men are too low; The Americans and Game of Thrones are too high) but I'm glad to see Enlightened at #1.

Also, do we have any idea when HBO plans to release season 2 on Blu Ray?
it's probably never going to happen right :(
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Yeah, I was shocked at the ranking for both of those shows - but while I don't see eye to eye on everything Poniewozik likes, more than not his taste aligns with mine strongly and his writing is amongst my favourite.

But big ew to critics including that Girls' episode on "best eps of the year."

And fuck, I still can't believe we're not getting a bluray for season 2.
 
R

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
anaron said:
Yeah, I was shocked at the ranking for both of those shows - but while I don't see eye to eye on everything Poniewozik likes, more than not his taste aligns with mine strongly and his writing is amongst my favourite.

But big ew to critics including that Girls' episode on "best eps of the year."
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Poniewozik is one of my favorites as well. He's one of the least reactionary, most level headed critics out there.

ugh
 
D

dead souls

Member
Lol at the idea that either Game of Thrones or The Americans are top ten material. The only list I'd place them on is a list of the most overrated shows.
 
A

anaron

Member
Enlightened came in at #4 on Indiewire's top 10.
It's sad, certainly, that Mike White's melancholic and lovely show was canceled this year. But its second season, lasting just eight episodes, was all but perfect, capturing a character in her most maddening, yearning, inconsistent and hopeful. Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) is a character for the ages, well-meaning but self-serving, full of grand self-help talk that masked much more mundane intentions, a sharply believable portrait of a woman in search of higher meaning in corporate Southern California setting that was far from transcendent. An argument could be made that Amy ran a little too abrasive in the show's first season, but this year on "Enlightened" was precisely calibrated and delicate in its timing and its portrayal of its challenging main character. And while Dern's performance is the heart and soul of the show, the two instances in which it stepped away from her -- to visit Levi (Luke Wilson) in rehab in Hawaii and to peek into the life of Tyler, played by White himself -- were equally good, worthy of standing alone as shorts about loneliness and the yearning for connection.
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A

anaron

Member
Emily Nussbaum of the New Yorker hates doing too 10 lists but she writes

As some evidence that I have no great gift for math, to my mind the best series of 2013 is Mike White’s anxiety-provoking, weirdly humane dark comedy “Enlightened,” which was cancelled in March. If I was a TV executive, maybe I’d have cancelled it, too, since the ratings stunk. But when you’re as numbers-blind as I am, you can see that it was actually a huge success, in the only way that matters: it shook up old ideas about what is possible on television.
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http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/12/emily-nussbaum-best-tv-shows-2013-sort-of.html

:)

don't ever *sort of* excuse hbo being completely fucking stupid in cancelling it, though
 
H

hateradio

The Most Dangerous Yes Man
HBO are jerks for cancelling it, no doubt.

I could be watching a new season of this show in a few weeks/months. :(


Why does alternate-universe me get to be happy?
 
D

Dennis

Banned
Every time this thread gets bumped I think a miracle has happened and some network or Netflix picked it up for a third season.

:(
 
E

Empty

Member
hateradio said:
I could be watching a new season of this show in a few weeks/months. :(
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worth a commemorative rewatch though

i'm sure the show will have lots of staying power. the strength of its characters, performances, the gorgeous direction and completeness of the story and general flawlessness will age wonderfully.
 
A

anaron

Member
Empty said:
worth a commemorative rewatch though

i'm sure the show will have lots of staying power. the strength of its characters, performances, the gorgeous direction and completeness of the story and general flawlessness will age wonderfully.
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As long as Enlightened is remembered properly as one of the best things ever and for being appropriately groundbreaking in its own unique way, I'll be satisfied.

Its work should've lent so much to the TV discussion and yet the conversation never even really started. :(

ETA: Ryan McGee of "The Boob Tube"/AV Club puts Enlightened & Orange is the new black as #1 for his best of 2013
 
A

anaron

Member
RatskyWatsky said:
Glad to see Sepinwall come around to the show, especially after his not so positive review of season 1.
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Based on his comments earlier in the year I was actually expecting at least #2 on his list but yeah, the appreciation is still nice regardless.

I guess I just selfishly want this show to beat Breaking Bad for the meltdown from its fans. :p
 
A

anaron

Member
Oh cool!

Exclusive: "Enlightening" Sketchfest Event Announced
SF Sketchfest is nearly upon us. The two-week comedy festival, running Jan. 23-Feb. 9, 2014, for which the schedule will be announced tomorrow, has given SF Weekly an exclusive announcement about one of its biggest events.

On Sunday, Feb. 2, the director and cast of the acclaimed and great prematurely canceled HBO series, Enlightened, come to San Francisco for "Becoming 'Enlightened.'" Star Laura Dern, director Mike White, and producer David Bernad will all be present at the event, along with Luke Wilson, Sarah Burns, Timm Sharp, and Jason Mantzoukas.

The team will be at Marine's Memorial Theatre, and for $30 you can listen to their stories about the show and bring all your pressing Enlightened-related questions. Maybe like, what would've happened in that third season that never happened? Would Mantzoukas have ever returned? What about Dermot Mulroney?
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A

anaron

Member
I know it's somewhat tacky to let 'best of lists' get under your skin, but is anyone else shocked and slightly unsettled that several writers that were arguably raving about Enlightened, didn't bother to include it on their top 10?

I knew in a year with Breaking Bad and so many other greats that the show probably wouldn't make everyone's number one like it rightly should but that kind of inconsistency just does not add up.
 
R

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
anaron said:
I know it's somewhat tacky to let 'best of lists' get under your skin, but is anyone else shocked and slightly unsettled that several writers that were arguably raving about Enlightened, didn't bother to include it on their top 10?

I knew in a year with Breaking Bad and so many other greats that the show probably wouldn't make everyone's number one like it rightly should but that kind of inconsistency just does not add up.
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Which critics in particular are you talking about?
 
A

anaron

Member
RatskyWatsky said:
Which critics in particular are you talking about?
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People like Willa Paskin and Matt Zoller Seitz

She wrote this about the show earlier

HBO’s “Enlightened” finished its second season last night, amid deep anxiety from its devoted admirers that the second season will also be the show’s last. The series, created by Mike White and starring Laura Dern, is truly like nothing else on TV: Lyrical and unflinching, poetic and brutal, idealistic and incisive, gorgeous and painful, it is steadily, quietly up to something new. It has a searching thoughtfulness, an earnest interest about how one should be in the world, and how this can run afoul of how one is in the world. It is genuinely philosophical, which perhaps means it’s up to something old, something much older than TV anyway.
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Didn't make her top 10.

Zoller Seitz wrote this about the show (and was consistently raving about S1)

Contemporary TV is suddenly filled with shows starring charismatic yet ostentatiously flawed heroines: Homeland, The Mindy Project, Girls, Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Enlightened stands out because its vision is so much wider. It’s not just about Amy and her co-workers, or the question of which of them, if any, are “sympathetic.” It’s about how hard it is to change anything in this country, even small stuff, and how people will do or say anything to keep from rocking the boat. No one on Enlightened is easy to like—except maybe Tyler, a sad sack with a crush on Amy—but they’re equally hard to hate. White (who writes most of the episodes) treats every character as a human being worthy of empathy, even when they’re selling one another out to preserve their personal status quo. “Maybe I’m a mole,” Tyler tells Amy, “but I’m a happy mole.”
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Didn't make his top 10.
 
N

Net_Wrecker

Member
So uuuuhhhhhh, I apologize for never watching this while it was airing and for being part of the problem.

This show was incredible. The spider web of character relationships, motivations, arcs, and characterization built over only eighteen 30-minute episodes of television is just unbelievable. The show was everything: Beautiful, funny, uplifting, frustrating, depressing, upsetting, poetic, uncomfortable; Enlightened was utterly human in a way very few shows I've seen have been. I was reading the reactions to season 1 vs. 2, and though I get why some preferred the first, I think the evolution of the show from 1 --> 2, despite maybe being an attempt for better ratings, was a blessing in disguise. It felt right for the show to come out of season 1's floaty, meditative, drifting tone into a more focused, driven show (while maintaining elements of the first season) because that was Amy's arc. I truly feel the show was getting better and better with each passing episode, and the third season being about the lawsuit would've been great.

In the end, I've grown a callus from the number of shows I've loved that got cut short, this one right on the heels of Luck which met an even quicker demise with huge potential left untapped, but I'm happy we got these 18 episodes. Brilliant show.
 
H

hateradio

The Most Dangerous Yes Man
TommyManberg said:
Holy shit that's the bitch from Jurrasic Park! I thought she had died. I'll check this out.
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twd_shiiituokyu.gif
 
A

anaron

Member
Flavorwire's Michelle Dean: The Year the Social Media Dam broke

I feel I have to start with a caveat, and it’s going to sound melodramatic, and it is melodramatic. But when they canceled Enlightened in March I was “done” with popular culture. The rants I could go on were epic. What got me by the throat about the end of Enlightened was that it was the best thing airing and you simply could not get people really talking about it. People get mad when I compare it to Girls, but I do because they were both low-rated shows on the same network, and to an extent were both only ever going to appeal to similar crowds: your bicoastal literary/art nerds. And I could name a single incident in Girls on Twitter and set off an avalanche of commentary, but Enlightened just had to fly solo for the entirety its brief and beautiful life. It wasn’t that the show wasn’t topical in a way that could have made it one of those nightly think piece things: it was about women and corporate greed. And it wasn’t that Enlightened didn’t provide really great personal-essay fodder, because a lot of its episodes posed giant philosophical questions about what it means to be a person in our day and age. It was a little weird and offbeat, but then a lot of more popular things — I’m back at Girls again — are, and they survive.

Enlightened, I have come to believe, died from something simpler: a lack of “buzz.” It was missing the entropic quality which kicks in somewhere between a thing being good and it being perceived as such by a large number of people, and that damned it. It might one day become one of those cult shows people brag about having caught when they originally aired, but that’s the best it can hope for.

Because we don’t live in an age, if ever we did, where you can survive without “buzz.”
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Television seems, gradually, to be getting this message by designing episodes that will be GIF-able and meme-able. I’ve observed this myself several times, but I’m in debt to this item in Slant magazine for pointing out that as high a horse as Mad Men’s has fallen for the gag. They had that episode where everyone just got high and acted crazy, and it did not contribute much dramatically but, yes, there were a lot of GIFs that resulted, some of which we can now use to flip each other off on the Internet.

I applaud GIF-ability (a word?) as a general rule. My life would not have taken the form it has without Michael Jackson eating popcorn or what I call the “No Regrets Chicken” GIF. It seems wrong for it to be happening by design, like a creator is saying: I am happy for you to chop up my work and put it on the Internet without any context. I am happy for discussion of my work to happen at a pace at which most people can’t actually think about what it is they are ingesting. I don’t, for the record, actually believe that creators are happy to have their work discussed in this way, but there is a kind of capitulation going on. Because if you are not so GIF-able and you do not hook the Internet’s interest, you are Enlightened instead of Girls. You are dead instead of alive.

Which is more than a little depressing to think about.

Here’s something less depressing: People have never been very good at sorting wheat from chaff on the first go-round. Great works of art have always been rejected by the gallerinas and publishers; Jane Austen and Faulkner and the rest all sold way better after their deaths than before. Whole pop culture cults are built on someone presuming that they found the good thing that everyone else, in their obsessions with the fashions of the day, rejected.
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C

ctothej

Member
Does anyone else think this would have gotten a big ratings bump if HBO renewed it? Everyone I know who watched it only discovered it after season 2 ended. As long as the quality was consistent, I think word of mouth would have definitely increased ratings ala Breaking Bad. I don't think the show would have smashed, but it could have at least pulled in 1.5-2 million per episode.
 
I

ivysaur12

Banned
I think there's a world in which Enlightened could've gotten more viewers. I'm not sure what could've been done differently, but, yeah.

The critical hype going into season 3 would've been considerably larger than the one going into season 2.
 
D

dead souls

Member
ctothej said:
Does anyone else think this would have gotten a big ratings bump if HBO renewed it? Everyone I know who watched it only discovered it after season 2 ended. As long as the quality was consistent, I think word of mouth would have definitely increased ratings ala Breaking Bad. I don't think the show would have smashed, but it could have at least pulled in 1.5-2 million per episode.
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Probably not unfortunately. The Flavorwire article is right, Enlightened just had almost no buzz.

Sadly the only time it got any decent coverage is when it got axed.
 
A

anaron

Member
ctothej said:
Does anyone else think this would have gotten a big ratings bump if HBO renewed it? Everyone I know who watched it only discovered it after season 2 ended. As long as the quality was consistent, I think word of mouth would have definitely increased ratings ala Breaking Bad. I don't think the show would have smashed, but it could have at least pulled in 1.5-2 million per episode.
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Obviously you can't predict anything for certain but yes, I absolutely do.

Though not dramatically improved, season 2 of Enlightened had better ratings than season 1.

Though still horrendously small, a circle of discussion actually existed in season 2 replacing the practically nonexistent one in season 1.

The critical reception was overwhelmingly positive in general as opposed to the (dumb) lukewarm response to season 1 and we now close the year with the show making most Top 10 lists and even being crowned #1 by several prominent critics. We now have quotes claiming "the best show of 2013" that HBO could plaster all over the marketing for a season 3.

Enlightened was never going to be a hit show, but it had everything in its favour going further to do a lot better than it was. Knowing that just one more season would have completed Mike White and Laura Dern's story just illustrates and confirms for me that HBO wasn't terribly supportive of it.
 
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