At barely four hours in length, you could watch the entire second (and, sadly, final) season of HBO’s Enlightened in the time it would take to watch an extended cut of Return of the King. I bring it up because the express appeal of television is that it can take its time. With potentially dozens of hours of content rolling out over a single season or multiple ones, there’s time to explore every facet of a show’s characters the way my previous pick does, or to set up an elaborate series of dominoes that will eventually fall down in perfect sequence (like my next pick). Enlightened wasn’t really either type of show, despite hinging its second season on focused, succinct arc that still made time to detour into the lives of Tyler, Levi, and everyone else caught up in the Category Five hurricane of optimism that was Amy Jellicoe.
As the waters separating TV comedies and dramas continue to muddy, Enlightened sidestepped the issue entirely by simply being bracingly, uncompromisingly earnest. This, understandably, means it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. With such a naïve do-gooder of a protagonist, and a soundtrack that’d probably fit in at any day spa, the show will strike many as featherweight. Yet Enlightened’s sunny surface exists as a necessary counterbalance to the deeply personal and existential darkness it was born out of.
Unlike many more popular dramas and cynical comedies that exploit misery, Enlightened chose to tackle it head on, sometimes foolishly, when it wanted to make you laugh, sometimes nobly, when it wanted to make you stand up and cheer. The TV landscape is a lot less special without Mike White’s brilliant little pearl of a creation in it, and hopefully it will serve to inspire a new wave of shows that don’t care about being good, so much as they care about being honest.