Cheat To Win

HBO finally announced the arrival of Enlightened Season Two on DVD.  August 13th cannot come quickly enough.

I’ve had a rough go of it lately so I’m curled up in bed and rewatching Enlightened.  I anticipate some major feels in the horizon.

I am disconsolate.

Yet at the same time, those criticisms don’t particularly bother me. The show is too white and too upper-class, yes, but that’s a broad, systemic problem within the TV industry, and harping on this little-watched show as if it’s the standard-bearer in that department strikes me as a strange way to tackle that problem. (Even more bizarre are the still-lurking accusations of nepotism, as if HBO is throwing open its doors for every child of artist parents. If anything, the nepotism complaints are attempting to get at complaints about the skewing of the class system in America, but, again, that’s a problem that extends far beyond Girls.) And almost all of the other “flaws” I described above—except perhaps the show’s inability to know how to use its ensemble from time to time—are things that are so endemic to the series’ strengths that it seems impossible to separate them from what I love about it.

Todd VanDerWerff understands me and my views on television in a way that I will never be able to articulate.

“When a naked Hannah dribbled hot sauce all over herself in front of the doctor, shit in every corner of the office, cried, became angry with the doctor, had sex with the doctor, finished her burrito, had sex with the doctor again, shit herself again, and then realized who she was really angry at and sexually attracted to was Adam, I just closed my eyes and said, ‘Thank you.’ These are real girls with real bodies doing things that real girls do.” 

Source

“You’re just full of hope.  You have more hope than most people do. It’s a beautiful thing to have a little hope for the world.”

I don’t want to post any spoilers for those of you catching up (or just now starting) Enlightened, but suffice to say the final paragraph of this article almost brought me to tears.

I will, however, leave you with this:

9. Enlightened thinks we ultimately deserve to see good people win.

10. We don’t ultimately feel like we deserve to see good people win.

Because in many ways, Enlightened is the necessary antidote to The Wire. This is not to say that the earlier show isn’t important or groundbreaking or fantastic, just that it looked up at the institutions we humans had built and offered a weary sigh of resignation. The most frequent question leveled about Enlightened by people only tangentially familiar with it is “How is that a comedy?” when it seems to have so few obvious laughs. And while that’s certainly the case, I would say Enlightened is a comedy in the traditional sense, a story where things don’t necessarily end well, but end with tiny glimmers of hope for the future. In the second season, a character tells Amy that she hopes so much that it can scare people, and that’s almost the show’s point. It is not worth it to lose yourself to despair. It is not worth it to give up hope entirely. It is not worth it to believe the system will defeat you forever. Things change. Systems are worn down. But people endure. If the characters on The Wire might offer up those weary sighs when asked how to effect change, Amy Jellicoe might pull you aside and say (in the most irritating way possible) to relax. To breathe. To let it go.

There is time. There is so much time.

Todd VanDerWerff from The AV Club encapsulated everything I want to say about Enlightened in one post.  Bravo, sir.

Totally into this.

I’m so glad someone finally explained the episode the same way I saw it - you’re not supposed to assume it’s real.  And it’s not entirely clear that it’s a dream either.  It IS supposed to make you think, though…and if you were paying attention, it succeeded.

That’s “One Man’s Trash,” I think. I added that “I think” because being any more definitive than that would violate the spirit of the episode. You can’t “prove” what did or did not happen in “One Man’s Trash,” or say for certain how much of it occupies a place within the show’s established timeline of “real” characters and events. It does feel like an ellipse of some kind — or maybe a cul-de-sac from which Hannah emotionally escapes when the “relationship” goes to hell in a handbasket. (I love that mini-arc, by the way; it reminded me a little bit of that brilliant answering-machine sequence in Jon Favreau’s Swingers.) What’s happening in “One Man’s Trash” is “real” in the sense that it reflects Hannah’s personality, wants, needs, desires, and fears, and perhaps exposes an unpleasant part of herself that she’d otherwise deny. One “tell” that jumped out at me was Joshua’s vague account of the breakup of his marriage, which included what sounded like placeholder dialogue that Hannah would presumably fill in with real dialogue during revision (“ … real stuff that causes problems, and, uh, marriages to end”). Another is the scene where she makes him ask her to stay over and over and over, in different intonations, like an actor in a TV show produced by and starring Hannah Horvath. “I want you to stay” is one reading. “I don’t want to ever be without you” is another. They’re all so needy, and so fantastical, that they become a kind of verbal pornography, designed to give a secret princess an emotional orgasm.

entouragemovie:

CHASTAIN 

Whoever invented this “leaked Entourage script pages” tumblr is a genius, bro.

I have always wanted the complete series on DVD.

HBO is developing a sequel to Game Change (sadlynot entitled Game Change 2: More Games, Less Change) based on the 2012 election. Like Game Change, which eventually went on to win four Emmys, the movie will be based on a book by Mark Halperin and New York’s own John Heilemann. Halperin and Heilemann are currently working on Double Down: Game Change 2012 with the intention of a fall 2013 release. The film will follow after. In related news, Julianne Moore just bought a Paul Ryan wig.  

I cannot wait to breathlessly read this absurdly biased well-researched book and then host a party for the premiere on HBO.  I am not kidding in the slightest.