Good writing always cheers me up. 2011 may turn out to be an exceptional year for scripted half-hour TV comedy series. Two and a Half Men seems to have successfully replaced Charlie Sheen with Ashton Kutcher. Two Broke Girls is the most successful new series on TV. The Big Bang Theory continues to hold Thursday night for CBS. Whoever thought CBS would wrest Thursday away from NBC? New Girl is drawing viewers on Fox. 30 Rock will be back later in the season along with the premier of Chelsea Handler’s new situation comedy. Modern Family, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Community, The Middle, How I Met Your Mother, Raising Hope, and Rules of Engagement are all alive and well.
There’s a lot to like right now on the half-hour comedy front.
There’s also one new half-hour comedy series that simply takes my breath away; that is as smart and different and funny and deep and surprising and thought-provoking and just plain brilliant as anything I have ever seen on television. It is as good as anything you will see at the movies, too. That astounding new series is Enlightened on HBO.
One of the most impressive things about The Office when it first came on the air was how the comedy cut so close to the bone. The characters weren’t just real, they were uncomfortably real. The series was as unsettling as it was funny. Enlightened starts at the highest point ever achieved by The Office and then leaps ten stories higher.
Enlightened achieves a level of sophistication and emotional honesty seldom seen on television – and even more rarely seen in the movies. The scripts accomplish a dramatic complexity to which few of us can even hope to aspire.
The acting lives up to the writing. Laura Dern is sure to win an Emmy for her performance as Amy Jellicoe, a tortured, neurotic, self-absorbed former executive for a Riverside, California corporation that seems as vapid as the building it occupies and the city it calls home. The rest of the cast, including Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd, and Luke Wilson, is as good as Dern. Wilson has not been this well-used since The Royal Tannenbaums.
The look of the series is also impressive, as good as a feature film. Scenes are washed in specific colors - often very soft pastels - that add to the mood of the moment.
I send an astonished level of respect to co-creators Laura Dern and Mike White (Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl, School of Rock). White also appears in the series as Amy Jellicoe’s co-worker, Tyler.
Usually only playwrights and novelists are allowed to reach down so deeply inside of themselves. Those of us who are lucky enough to write for the screen are seldom offered this degree of creative freedom. Most of us aren't up to it, anyway. HBO has handed such an opportunity to Mike White and Laura Dern, and they have made the most of it. I’m in awe of Mike White. This is near genius.
Thank you, Mike White, Laura Dern, and HBO for Enlightened. I pray the audience appreciates what you have given them, and I sorely hope that this will be the beginning of a long run.
One last note: I saw Clint Eastwood’s new film, J. Edgar, on Tuesday night at the DGA. It is also pretty remarkable. I’m sure an Oscar nomination will be forthcoming for Leonardo DeCaprio. The movie is a little slow, but it is also more complex than you’d expect. Clint Eastwood is a Republican, so I didn’t expect an Oliver Stone-type hatchet job on Hoover – even if Hoover deserved it. Written by Dustin Lance Black, who also wrote the screenplay for Milk, J. Edgar is a tragedy, a tortured love story, and it humanizes a man who has been almost entirely misrepresented, either as a hero he never was or as a monster. Turns out he was a complex and deeply flawed human being, very much like Amy Jellicoe on Enlightened, and not that different from the rest of us.
