Real mixed bag. I feel like Enlightened its age more than most other shows from the time because the cultural understanding & discussion of both therapy and corporate greed have changed a lot since it came out. I like how sincere it is, though, and there are some moments of genuine emotional clarity in a way that not many other shows allow themselves to engage with.
Unfortunately, the ways it tries to be a comedy are the weakest elements. Having the characters get harassed & degraded is really hard to watch & I think there's a clearer cultural understanding now that the sort of behavior shown by the managers here should be called out & can lead to intervention or lawsuits. Laura Dern plays her really well, but Amy is set up to be way more naïve than I can find believable, even in a workplace sitcom (which this isn't really). I'm not sure if it's because of the perception of New Age-y spiritual people at the time or for the sake of comedy but her character trying to be woke but failing because of incompetence & pettiness & failure to actually understand the things she's mad about just drags everything down & slows down the pace of the show. (she still has the right ideas & goals in the end, but it's baffling that she can identify the company's mistreatment of its workers & the environment, but is presented as being completely incapable of presenting that information to anyone without flying off the handle - maybe it's supposed to be a Mike Judge style smart-but-socially-incompetent character? but she's also set up as being capable of self reflection and in her mind as well as the show's intro/outro narration demonstrates a level of emotional intelligence that just isn't present most of the times she's actually interacting with people). It's frustrating because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here, but the show is almost actively painful to watch.
Simple, easy watch, but fun and surprisingly wholesome
Simple, easy watch, but fun and surprisingly wholesome
Such a weird genre mashup that I can't help but love the ambition. It's kinda trying to do the prestige-TV political thriller of something like Game of Thrones but in a more grounded setting that leans into a real world events and ideologies but also it's a Western and the protagonist can solve most conflicts with sick Kung-Fu stunts. It creates such a wildly dissonant experience and I just really enjoy it as a cartoon version of modern HBO storytelling (not that it's like, worse than game of thrones or whatever, I'm just over that style of show). If anything I wish it leaned even more silly & let these actors chew scenery even more rather than trying to hold the facade of serious motivation. The weird tone makes it hard to watch more than 1 episode at a time unless I'm doing something else at the same time, which is a bummer cuz I really wanna see where the second season takes things.
wasn't a huge fan of the judging but I really liked watching people make glass and really liked a few of the competitors. The 30 minute format makes it so there isn't too much fake reality show drama & I really appreciate that. Messed up that they call the furnaces Glory Holes, tho, they really shouldn't've done that
My favorite part of season 1 was the bits where Mando would stumble into a town and bumble his way through saving everyone, but season 2 is so invested in making you think everyone's a cool badass that it loses basically all of that after the first episode. Idk why people got hype about Boba Fett here, he basically does nothing. Really didn't need Cara Dune or the Racist Guy or the Sniper Lady back either, lol, but I woulda loved more Carl Weathers...
I was pretty into the first few episodes, but by the end I was struggling to find a reason to care. The "everyone kinda dies randomly" thing is common enough in Coen Brothers movies, but It didn't feel earned here. I liked Chris Rock in his role & Jason Schwartzman did ok (that character's a bit too silly for the tone of the rest of the show, tho, Imo), but very few of the other characters stood out. There's also like 3 different 'The Joker's in this show? I guess there's been 1 in each of the previous seasons, but at least those characters were really crucial to the events of their season, in S4, the Nurse, the Brother and the Mormon felt secondary in each of their stories...
Maybe Legion has pushed Noah Hawley in a Style Over Substance direction? But this season more than the previous ones didn't really feel like a Coen Brothers movie anymore. It didn't quite feel like a capital-G Ganster thing either, tho, so it didn't scratch either itch very well.
I love some good sports anime. Not quite up there with Ping Pong or March Comes in Like a Lion for me, but way closer than I expected. All the drugs/alcohol stuff & gestures at talking about gender & race early on set off some flags, but in almost every case I think they handled that stuff with a lot of nuance. The directing style also kinda caught me off guard, the color palette and music and camerawork are very modern-prestige Netflix house style, but the way the show cut away from a lot of dramatic moments and underplayed other ones was surprising. Usually I can see where the drama is telegraphed, but there were a lot of moments where the show just chose not to be unrealistically melodramatic about stuff & I really appreciate that. Also, shoutouts to Anya Taylor Joy for being great in general but also playing Beth as a more realized character than the usual biopic Autistic Genius thing.
Biggest problem with the first season was that I wished the show would be nicer to Guillermo so I was real happy when his growth and resistance against being belittled turned out to be the main arc of season 2. Season 2 also just has a lot more goofy episodic one-off things focusing on a single main character that I enjoyed a lot. The Jackie Daytona episode is an all time favorite.
I like the runway shows and the designers all seemed cool and interesting, but the fake reality show drama (fake time pressure, repeated and over dramatic storylines) was very naked and spoiled a lot of it to the point where i wanted to fast forward thru most episodes. Probably less of an issue if you watch a lot of reality shows but I don't.
I guess it was impossible to hold the same level of absurdity as The Favourite for a 10 hour show, but I was still disappointed with how TV-show-y it started to become. The humor and ridiculousness is on point throughout, I just started to get used to it and it started to feel like a TV show-ass TV show, somewhere in between a work-place sitcom and Game of Thrones (the imagery and tone never matches what The Favourite, but no one can copy Yorgos Lanthimos so I"m glad this show mostly didn't try). I also had assumed it would be a miniseries rather than a seasonal thing, so I ended up a bit disappointed with the pace of the show. With the coup declared within the first 2 episodes, but not paid off until the final one of the season, it started to feel a bit too procedural.
That all sounds negative, but I really enjoyed watching the show and I'm looking forward to the next season. I was frequently squirming thinking about how Catherine's plans were going to fail spectacularly, even though I know that she has to win in the end. A lot of the characters ended up being much more interesting than I was initially expecting, also. I especially loved Elizabeth, Georgina, and Marial and how they played off of Catherine and Peter. The way the show blends old-timey language ('japes', 'huzzah!') with things like calling each other 'fucking idiots' stayed funny throughout. I guess that's part of the point of the show (and The Favourite) - presenting these big historical figures as stupid and silly and petty, in a way that they would have to have been, but which most historical accounts choose to ignore in place of presenting everything as refined elegance and beautiful nobility and shit.
It's no Ninja Warrior Japan, but mostly pretty fun. All the different Commentators interacting is great. It sucks that the challenges are mostly climbing and distance based, tho, so taller competitors just had a huge advantage.
I was a bit bummed out that the core relationships that the drama stems from are pretty basic, but I guess that they were kinda necessary to have some grounding for all the crazy complex ideas to bounce off of.
The reveal about the name was real dumb, I really enjoyed that. The show has moments of obvious humor, like cuts & angles $ awkward interactions you'd see in a comedy, but it comes off as almost off putting in the context of the usual heavy droning abstract music, people staring into the camera mournfully aesthetic. The effect of that is unnerving and it feels like it should throw the tone off balance, but personally I found it made me more engaged. It's like the show telling me that it's not trying to be realistic or recreate known human emotions and dilemmas. Everyone talks so plainly and slowly & with a consideration that people in real life (or in most movies) only ever find briefly. The 'drama' of the show is mostly about people coming to terms with big metaphysical realizations, so I guess it makes sense that they just say what they think a lot.
I appreciate that the focus was always on the character reactions. The twists and revelations are presented as being wild and huge, and I guess I haven't seen all of them in the specific arrangement they have here, but each of the individual beats and ideas are common to a lot of sci-fi. The drama isn't "what are they going to do" it's "how would that affect a person". Like for as much as dweebs like Elon Musk will talk about 'what if the world was a computer simulation' or whatever, they never really extrapolate past that into the things that would be actually interesting to think about. I don't give a shit if Deckard was a robot or not, but it's really interesting to think about what it means for the world around him if he was, right?
Feels a bit more dry than I remember season 1 being, but it also leans harder into the Hannibal meets James Bond meets, like a workplace comedy thing, which I'm really into. That dryness makes the very pulpy storylines feel a bit strange, though. In hannibal, the killers feel seductive because the visuals and mood of the show lure you in, in Killing Eve, I understand that the character is being seductive, and I understand why the other character might fall for that, but the difference between understanding something and feeling makes a big difference in this kind of show.
That sounds overly negative, tho. I still like this season a lot. The characters and their roles are well defined now, so the surprises maybe don't hit as hard, but having those relationships in stone makes watching all these people work together engaging in it's own way.
I still really like it on rewatch. But in comparison to the movie, I think stretching out that style of story to 10 hrs makes it feel more nihilistic and gruesome than i wanted. And I'm not a huge fan of how some of the female side characters get treated as disposable or just stupid. I guess you could say that's a factor of the show focusing on this very shitty man, but it was still uncomfortable.
That aside, it's really interesting how this first season interprets what Fargo is about. There's overt connections to the plot of the movie, a pregnant cop, quirky midwestern affects covering up heinous violence - but the tone feels different, there's a focus on conspiracy and building up a Mastermind criminal. rather than flailing incompetence driven by pettiness or greed it's The Face of True Evil and i feel like that's actually a lot less interesting, thematically, tho i understand it was somewhat necessary in order to stretch a story across 10 hours, and it's mostly fun throughout.
It's consistently funny in offbeat, unexpected places & I love the relationship between the main two and the focus the show puts on them. The Adam stuff felt a bit flat, tho. It wasn't really clear to me why his turn happened & the kid stuff in general was the least developed despite being kinda the driving force of the plot. The horsemen stuff, similarly felt like the show kept telling me it was important but I never really felt that it was anything other than a chance to insert some more jokes & commentary.
The show's at it's best when it's about interviewing serial killers, so the first 5 episodes are great. But then the last 4 get bogged down in one case, which is slow & frustrating & unsatisfying, and I get that that's the point, but I think they could have easily got that message across in half the time. Also, like with the first season, you really miss David Fincher's touch on the episodes he doesn't direct, & you really feel that in the back half.
I appreciate the move away from focusing on Holden's personal life, because god does that guy suck, but the personal drama for Carr & Tench, like the season overall, started out promising & then really fizzled out. It's really painful to watch all the drama stem from things that would be so easily fixed if the people involved would just sit down & talk for a period of time longer than a scene of Dramatic Television. All the conflict is between people who are supposedly living together in between the scenes you're shown, but each one picks up as if nothing happened since the last, and obviously you can't resolve conflict in 2 minute dramatic bursts, you idiots.
The school stuff gives the season a really strong thruline & grounds everything else around it well. The political stuff was a bit underwhelming, since you get half the rise & half the fall without real payoff at the end of the season. The drug politics is kinda the same way, giving you a bit of resolution & then the start of conflict, but mostly leaving things to pop off in Season 5. But, all the stuff with Prez's students, where they end up, how they interact with Colvin & Carver, etc. is really well done & has a lot of really strong emotional beats. (tho, for my money, not quite up there with that equivalent story in Season 1)
I like it when the cool cars do cool stunts. The way they edit the action made it hard to keep up with at times. It got better after the first few episodes but they would still cut in the middle of drifts in a way that ruined the flow now & then. Also, in a lot of cases it felt like a test of the structural integrity of the cars rather than the driver's skill. That's fine in theory, almost all car based media runs into that on some level, but it felt really excessive here. I appreciate that they were willing to design obstacles around things that frustrated driver's, but it got out of hand. Also, the leveler sucks & eats up so much time in a race while slowing everything down & not really demonstrating the cool driving stunts the show is mostly about. Also really lame that that one guy just drove on with an automatic Lamborghini & did way better than he should have despite messing up most of the obstacles, just because his car was so much faster than everyone else...
But overall really fun & I hope season 2 improves on those few issues.
Feels the most like a typical season of a TV show so far. Folding in the politics stuff adds layers to what Season 1 was going for, but it feels like setup for the next season. The drug story, likewise, has a handful of strong beats & the Stringer stuff is great, but the feels less focused than the previous seasons & more like it's building up the next season than paying things off in season 3. Overall tho, it's still The Wire & I'm looking forward to revisiting the later seasons where they get more into the Politics & Newspaper stuff.
It's a good show
Doesn't go in as deep on systemic issues as the first season, but that's understandable as the show's setting up longer story arcs. I love seeing the setups now, on rewatch, knowing what's coming in the later seasons. The split between the original barksdale drug story and the this-season-only stevedore stuff makes this season feel a bit less propulsive than the previous one (and the next few, based on memory) but taking a look at the white, working class life & the reasons people have to commit similar crimes to the stuff covered in the rest of the series is really interesting and still extremely relevant in the current political context.
Liked it a bit less than the first season because it focused more on Rebbecca & Josh as characters, but often without their usual support structures, so they just keep making bad decisions. The Side character stuff wasn't as interesting as all the Greg & Darryl stuff from the first season. I like how it ended, though, excited to start the next season.
