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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
