...This can make the show something of an acquired taste. A couple of friends I’ve recommended it to come back confused. Are they supposed to “like” Amy? Sometimes she has tantrums; sometimes her social skills are off. She doesn’t really obey the conventions of melodrama, in seeming neither tragic nor heroic in her crusades. And in that she is actually more like a real human being, really trying to Do The Right Thing by her family, by her friends, and by the world, and finding that in fact the path to doing just that is not as clear as it seems.
Oddly, that suddenly makes the show much like Girls, doesn’t it? But Hannah Horvath and Amy are very different people. “The Right Thing” is not of any concern to Girls. The world outside Hannah and her friends barely exists for them, and while Girls does poke fun at that, it also doesn’t present any alternative viewpoint. Enlightened’s Amy was once, it seems, more like this, more wrapped up in her own life, and less prone to consider people outside her immediate vicinity. The show is about her process of opening herself up, one which runs in a less-than-ruler-straight line.
It’s a tiresome trope to hold a television character up as a “role model” – Amy’s fictional, after all. But watching White dramatize this process, which he has occasionally suggested is related to his own (he has told interviewers he had a similar breakdown in 2004), does inspire, at least a little. All those movies about the corporate whistleblowers and activists and their heroics, they seem so righteous, so convinced from the start that what they are doing is right and good. I mean, what they are doing is right and good. But the path to doing something that matters to a world wider than your own, well, it should involve a lot of self-questioning. Particularly if, like Amy, your day job ends up being more sinister than the banal, sunny corporate-speak that you’d been brought up your whole life to believe in.
The premiere is tonight, on HBO, following Girls, wherever you are.
