Few faces possess the unique elasticity, the hyper-mobility, or the chameleonic effect of Laura Dern’s singular visage. Able to contort her face into any manner of emotion demanded of her, Dern is an actor unafraid to cross the line between realism and exaggeration, crashing into messy emotions and difficult feelings with almost uncomfortable directness. It’s no wonder the Oscar winner is a favorite of the internet, her infinitely expressive face regularly cropping up on every social media platform in the form of memes or GIFs. One of the most widely shared GIFs featuring Dern depicts her sporting a smart denim jacket, her face twisted in anger but falling into a weary frown. She barely sighs out the words, “I’m just a woman who is over it.” Devoid of context, the snippet captures the exhausting experience of being a woman perfectly, but placed within its original context, the scene takes on a new, more powerful meaning.
The snippet is pulled from a scene filmed in 2013, from the second season finale of the little seen HBO show Enlightened. The rest of the scene captures just what made Enlightened such a special, nuanced, and genuinely uplifting show. “I’m tired of watching the world fall apart because of guys like you,” Dern continues, delivering a final blow to the manipulative leadership of Abaddon Industries, a pharmaceutical company entrenched in shady dealings she publicly exposed. As Dern struts out of the scene’s sunny California boardroom setting, she steps into a waiting elevator, watching the doors slowly close in front of her. She sits with the ruins of a life she used to know, exploded by her whistleblowing, realizing the way she lived in the past is not how her life will look going forward. Dern breaks into a pitch perfect nervous grin, her life imploding but her personal worth becoming fulfilled before her very eyes.
It’s a feeling Enlightened nailed at every turn: the idea that no matter how horrible life is, there is the possibility that people can better themselves and do the right thing. Enlightened, while often cynical and satirical, bore a deeply human feeling of recognizing and celebrating human error, never forgetting the human desire to be good in the world. Amy Jellicoe, Dern’s character she played for the sole two seasons of Enlightened, is a singular creation, both off-putting and magnetic, lovable in all of her flaws and overbearing proclivities. Jellicoe is the result of the combined creative minds of Dern and series creator Mike White, who, in addition to writing every episode of the series, also acts in an important supporting role. It is one of television history’s great tragedies that Dern and White’s show never found a wide audience, garnering acclaim but getting the axe after an incredible second season, its planned third season left to the imagination.
Season one of Enlightened finds Amy Jellicoe at rock bottom. Returning to her old workplace, Abaddon Industries, following a public meltdown brought on by an illicit affair, Amy claims to be a changed woman. Immersing herself in self-help culture, she bears an aggressively sunny attitude, one full of cracks exposing the insecurity underneath. These cracks are exacerbated by the circumstances she finds herself in: tucked away in a corporate hellscape at a company she used to wield real power at, living in a monotonous limbo of human resources stagnation. As if this professional decline weren’t enough, Amy contends with a variety of homelife troubles as well, with a withdrawn mother (played by Dern’s own mother, Diane Ladd) and a drug-addicted ex-husband (Luke Wilson) pulling her around as well.
Enlightened first aired 10 years ago, but it bears a stunning prescience and awareness of issues within the world that are still being explored and addressed today. In the show’s first season, sexual harassment is an ever-present reality of Amy’s workplace, even within the lower-rungs of Abaddon Industries. The two most prominent men are Dougie (Timm Sharp), a drugged-up scumbag who just happens to be Amy’s new boss, and White’s own Tyler, her depressive and shy co-worker. Both men cross sexual boundaries with Amy throughout the first season, with Tyler attempting to kiss her during a late night work shift, while Dougie drinks to excess and gropes her in a nightclub. Even more distressing, Dougie attempts to get her fired from Abaddon when she threatens to report him. Enlightened is a show concerned with corporate America, a horror story of power dynamics and abusive control. Even in a low-status human resources job, the men wield the power and lord it over women at every chance. When those at the bottom of the corporate food chain act like this, it begs the question of what those at the top are getting away with, something that our culture and society has been reckoning with for many years now.
Season two of Enlightened takes on a very different tone and dramatic arc from the show’s first season, while still maintaining the trademark wit and vulnerability that defined the show to begin with. Once Amy finds herself teamed up with a LA Times journalist (Dermot Mulroney), the show locks into the narrative rhythm of a heist film. This plotline and tone perfectly complement Amy’s savior complex, her unshakable sense of being the main character in her own story. She is desperate for importance, so positioning her as the noble whistleblower provides White with ample opportunity for sharp satire and smart plotting, crafting an immensely entertaining season of television while also criticising the self-importance at the heart of the entire season. Season two of Enlightened builds into one of television’s finest individual seasons, a work of art that only grows in relevance with each passing year.
Despite this satirical quality, an edge that tends to lead into outright cynicism within White’s other film and television work, Enlightened is deeply concerned with humans and the struggles people endure to hold onto their own humanity. Few shows are as moving as White’s masterpiece, a show that brings tears to the eyes without ever deploying cheap sentiment, every tear and gutpunch immensely earned. The bottle episode is a television mainstay, and few shows utilised standalone episodes as effectively as Enlightened did. In season one, White switches gears to focus on Amy’s mother, Helen, delivering a deeply ruminative and stirring episode driven by a stellar performance from Diane Ladd. Season two opts for a similar approach, focusing on Amy’s troubled ex-husband Levi, as he attempts to experience a spiritual awakening similar to Amy’s own. The drug addict finds himself riding a wave of emotions in recovery, from freedom and disillusionment to numbing emptiness. Luke Wilson delivers the finest acting of his career, giving a periphery character a fully fleshed out emotional life. These two standalone episodes are some of the most emotionally open television ever aired, among the handful of shows to bring tears to my eyes. They provide White the opportunity to expand and define the world Amy Jellicoe lives in, creating a setting and cast both multifaceted and grounded in realism.
Enlightened arrived at a difficult time in television’s history, right before the rise of streaming and in the midst of shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men running wild with the concept of the male anti-hero. In this transitory time, Amy Jellicoe arrived fully formed in Enlightened. High-strung and obsessed with self-improvement while also being intensely self-involved, Amy is a character made of contradicting layers, each one revealing new wrinkles to a character never easy to pin down. Audiences likely didn’t know what to think of Amy when she first appeared on television screens in 2011, judging from contemporaneous reviews. While audiences were used to male anti-heroes — their aggression, violence, and indulgence justified by the worlds around them — many were not so quick to embrace a woman like Amy Jellicoe. But in many ways, the distinctly feminine messiness of Amy feels like a prescient precursor to a whole wave of difficult women that took on iconic status during the streaming age, from Hannah Horvath of HBO’s own Girls to the protagonist of Fleabag years later, to the women of White’s own The White Lotus.
The story of Enlightened, both the show’s plot and production, is a story of lost opportunities and tantalizing what-ifs. Amy Jellicoe lives in the world of limitless opportunities that is her own mind, and Mike White seems to occupy a similar headspace. The writer/creator/actor regularly ponders publicly the possibility of a wrap-up to the show of some variety, and he has even shared plot points that were planned for a third season. However, like Amy, White’s ambition crumbles in the face of big business; in this case, that of the American television industry.
All we have left of Enlightened is the aired episodes, always available to stream now, and that widely shared GIF of feminine exhaustion. It’s a curious twist of events, as the show always bore a hint of scepticism about the internet itself. The GIF’s popularity echoes a sequence from the show’s second season, as Amy’s mind is set ablaze by the infinite possibilities for change and self-absorption provided by internet activism. She exalts the World Wide Web, breathing out the words, “I can hear its angels humming.” It’s a moment that captures the delightful web of contradictions that make Enlightened one of television’s greatest shows: spiritual, satirical, and oddly moving. Amy’s face becoming a GIF capturing the women fed up with the world’s mistreatment is oddly fitting, in fact. Amy would be proud.
