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Critic Reviews
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This engagingly uncomfortable series is not like anything you've seen before.
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It's HBO's most mature half-hour series ever, rising above the material worlds of Sex and the City and Entourage to offer a road worth taking in pursuit of a "higher self."
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Dern is fantastic as Amy--you cringe as her histrionics drive people away, and cringe again as she tries to suppress her feelings behind a veneer of New Age peacefulness.
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Enlightened is to my mind the most interesting and ambitious series of the fall season.
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[The] disappointment, and the full-hearted yet misguided ways Amy imagines she might transcend it, are the real subjects of the series, and Dern and White have both seemingly spent long careers in preparation for a project exactly as ambivalent, humane, and beautifully contradictory as this.
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It might be unwatchable if Dern, who's excellent, didn't allow Amy's laughable obtuseness to be pierced by glimmers of empathy and acceptance. [ 17 Oct 2011, p.40]
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By this third episode, the tone has become open, generous, and alert to every sort of character.
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It's a beautiful downer of a show that becomes more revealing and absorbing as it moves along.
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The series embraces the absurdities of its subject with enough compassion to avoid outright parody.
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Each episode moves her closer to some sort of insight, demonstrating that enlightenment is a moving spot on the horizon.
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This isn't just the story of one woman's search for relevance or power in a man's world; it's the story of one human being's search for meaning, one soul's search for redemption.
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Dern, Wilson, Ladd, White and Sharp are excellent in this strange little vehicle.
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If Amy really was enlightened, there'd be no show, but the fact that she's wearing her enlightenment like an ill-fitting coat gives the show both its comedic and plot trajectories.
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A black comedy working many shades of gray, Enlightened is about dark mornings of the soul and the fool's-golden glow of the new convert, and it measures the weight of the world with an eccentric scale.
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As not-quite-there as it may sometimes be, Enlightened is interesting enough to avoid the increasingly common HBO curse of egregious self-indulgence.
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Although the show features strong performances and is piercing in its emotional honesty, it also get bogged down in its own existential angst.
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The show's ethereal qualities are interesting in places but never particularly enlightening.
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Whether viewers find Enlightened all that funny may depend upon whether they have a person similar to Amy in their lives--and whether they want to spend time with an irrational, hysteria-prone fictional character, too.
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A rare HBO misfire--but I do hope Amy finds peace.
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I wish I were as invested in Amy's journey as she is, but as she blathers on about being an agent of change at her uncaring corporation, I find myself restless to change the channel to something that's actually entertaining or, yes, enlightening.
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The biggest downfall of Enlightened is doesn't know what it wants to be. It's in no-man's land between a comedy, a drama and a satire.
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As set up by White (and Dern, who's a producer and a contributor on the pilot script), Enlightened feels too lightweight to work as a short drama, and too clumsy in its attempts at humor to work that way.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 72 out of 114
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Mixed: 27 out of 114
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Negative: 15 out of 114
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Oct 24, 2011
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Jan 7, 2012This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Oct 13, 2011