The Miseducation Of Amy Jellicoe

If you are a TV obsessive and follow a lot of critics on Twitter, you will have been barraged, over the past week, with links to blog posts imploring you to start watching Enlightened, and imploring HBO to renew it for a third season. (Alan Sepinwall at HitFix.com rounded them all up in his review of last night's episode.) For those of us who've been letting Enlightened break our hearts since its premiere in the fall of 2011, this flurry of praise feels...well, like bandwagon-jumping, obviously, but worse than that, like a unanimous groundswell that may have come too late. It's certainly possible that the calls for readers to watch the show -- all of which, Season 1 included, has been available On Demand all season (and still is) -- may have led to such a burst of interest in the show that HBO will be moved to give the show another season; a sudden uptick in critical attention around the fourth season of The Wire, for instance, led to a pickup for a fifth and final season right after the Season 4 premiere. But last night was the finale of Enlightened's short second season. Why couldn't some of this hectoring have come sooner, and given the show a better chance at getting more traction with its potential audience?

Leaving aside the question of what HBO will do, the show's executive producers -- writer/director Mike White and series star Laura Dern -- can at least be proud of having delivered a perfect jewel of a second season, and without any evidence of serious compromise. While the show's (excellent) first season was about Amy Jellicoe (Dern) reintegrating into society after in-patient emotional rehab following a very public breakdown at Abaddon, her employer of fifteen years, over a failed affair with a co-worker, Season 2 gave Amy a mission: holding Abaddon to account for the harm it does in the world, and bringing down the company from within. In the first season, Amy's attempts to live a better life, and to apply the lessons she'd learned at Open Air, were slapdash and therefore doomed; Amy was in a constant state of reaction to her environment, too easily moved by news reports or her vague ideas of how to fulfill the needs of people in her life. But her attack on Abaddon gave her laser focus -- or, that is, the closest thing to laser focus this character is capable of.

As Dern plays her, Amy is a veneer of sunny optimism barely covering a yawning chasm of need, and we know why: her mother Helen (Diane Ladd) has never believed in her, which drove Amy into an ill-advised marriage to Levi (Luke Wilson), a drug addict who disappointed her constantly. Amy's love for both of them comes with a heavy dose of judgment; having completed the Open Air program, she believes she knows how both of them should live, and is constantly trying to pull them onto her level. But we in the audience know how naïve Amy's goals are, how heedlessly she's pursuing a project she barely understands, and rooting for her even as we realize she can't possibly succeed is what makes her so tragic.

The cracks started to show in the season's very busy penultimate episode. First, Amy was tempted with the fulfillment of one of her old goals, as Abaddon CEO Charles Sziden (James Rebhorn) offered her a job -- at a $100,000 a year salary -- acting as Abaddon's social conscience. Poor Amy actually thinks (a) that the creation of such a post could represent a meaningful opportunity for Abaddon to improve its corporate practices and not merely to insulate it from criticism as it continues doing what it's always done, and (b) that she could stop Jeff (Dermot Mulroney) from publishing the muckraking newspaper article for which she's spent the whole season supplying him with research, and then take the job. Jeff angrily corrects her, telling her it's too late for her to stop what she's started; when she relents in her Amy-ish way -- agreeing with him because she can tell it's what he wants her to do, and not because she accepts that he's right -- he goes on to tell her that they have to stop seeing each other, which, as he puts it, they both knew was only a casual thing anyway. She quietly replies that she didn't know, takes her leave with some dignity, and then has the violent rage attack she should have directed at Jeff the advantage-taking jerk in her car, alone -- the sort of out-of-control meltdown we hadn't really seen from Amy since the series premiere. Even as Open Air tried to teach Amy techniques to manage anger like this, but her reaction reads like a presentiment of the fact that she's gotten herself into the kind of trouble she can't see her way out of.

So the season ends as it must. Tidings of Jeff's story reach Sziden too soon; Amy is not prepared for the fallout of being a whistleblower. In the opening narration, Amy asks, "Am I an agent of change, or a creator of chaos?" By the end of the episode, it's still not clear. Before the half-hour is over, Amy's jeopardized her friendship with Krista (Sarah Burns), which she's just barely managed to repair, by wrongly accusing her of having leaked to Sziden. But she's also kept a brave face with Sziden even as the company's lawyer threatens to sue her for misappropriating privileged company documents; she's shielded Tyler (White) from the fallout of this misadventure by assuring his new (first? only?) girlfriend, Sziden's assistant Eileen (Molly Shannon), that Tyler is blameless. Though Amy doesn't know it, we see that her part in what we assume will be Sziden's downfall has made Helen proud.

Throughout the season, it hasn't been entirely clear whether the misdeeds Amy has been trying to expose are as bad as Jeff keeps telling her they are -- indeed, their nature has been kept deliberately vague, so that the audience remains uncertain whether Amy is putting herself in that much danger and, if so, if it's worth it. Sziden's reaction, however, lets us know how right Amy has been. The fallout seems to be greater even than Amy had thought it could be; "They said they're going to sue me--" she tells Jeff, who replies, "Well, we knew that was going to happen." "We did?" She's brave to have done what she's done, even if she didn't realize how brave until it was too late for her to take it back, and even if Sziden's threats of ruining her can't be too scary given her shitty car and $20,000 in consumer debt. In the end, she has managed to live a bigger life, even if it's not the one she envisioned for herself. Her final scene with Levi suggests that he might be part of that life -- that the greatest impact she's had, greater even than bringing down Sziden, is in her love for Levi and her belief in his strength has led to his becoming a better person, and one who could be worthy of her. (I mean, I think that's what the show wants me to think. If I'm being completely honest, the even more important consequence of Amy's project is to bring together Tyler and Eileen.)

If the show gets a third season, there is huge potential for where it could go. Amy has pledged to move out of Helen's house: what will that be like? Amy has been fired from Abaddon: where will she go next? Amy and Levi may not be done with one another: how will their story develop? But even if we never get to see how any of those threads resolve, this ending feels satisfying enough. Amy's self-doubt -- "Am I crazy?" -- is met by Levi's reassurance: "No, you're just full of hope. You've got more hope than most people do. It's a beautiful thing to have a lot of hope for the world." And even as Amy's naïveté can make the audience feel terrified for her, the show forces us to agree that he's right.