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Enlightened Season 2 |OT| Even agents of change get cancelled sometimes.

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A

anaron

Member
Ratsky: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/15/141274345/fresh-air-weekend-mike-white-marriage-plot


oh and look

Acdf7tf.jpg


:)
 
E

Empty

Member
retweeted that enlightened fans link.

only 689 retweets welp

also that fresh air interview is great and got me to watch the show in the first place!
 
C

crackhead_bob

Member
I love Terri Gross' interviews on NPR. Her talks with Six Feet Under creator, Alan Ball was very insightful. She interviewed him after the end of season one, and spoke with him again after the show wrapped up its finale. I never cared for True Blood, but I have a great deal of respect for Alan Ball for how he was able to steer his show from beginning to end. I really hope this show gets a chance to finish itself on its own terms. Laura Dern's an amazing actor in that she can shift from comedic to tragic, and then back to comedic without having to work at it. Her performance in Blue Velvet and Citizen Ruth were a revelation to say the least. She also provided some understated humor as Katherine Harris in the HBO biopic, Recount, based on the 2000 presidential election.
 
B

basefree

Member
Totally ready for this week's ep. I've rewatched the last one several times now, it's just brilliant. Really praying this get picked up for one more final season to wrap it up, it doesn't feel like it's ready to go quite yet.
 
A

anaron

Member
So yeah, penultimate episode tonight!


2x08 "No Doubt" written by Mike White (duh) and directed by David Michod. (Animal Kingdom)
 
C

crackhead_bob

Member
Honestly, I think 13 for hour long episodes would suffice, with 20 or so for half hour shows. HBO used to produce 13 episode seasons until they started expanding their concepts with shows like Deadwood and Carnivale. I wish HBO and Showtime could produce 16 episode seasons and then split them up like AMC has done with the Walking Dead these past 2 seasons.
 
D

dead souls

Member
crackhead_bob said:
Honestly, I think 13 for hour long episodes would suffice, with 20 or so for half hour shows. HBO used to produce 13 episode seasons until they started expanding their concepts with shows like Deadwood and Carnivale. I wish HBO and Showtime could produce 16 episode seasons and then split them up like AMC has done with the Walking Dead these past 2 seasons.
Click to expand...

I can't agree with this at all. Shorter episode orders are almost always better. Even plenty of 12-13 episode long cable seasons seem too long. I love that HBO and Showtime order 10 episode seasons of a lot of shows now. That's just about the perfect length.

Decent episode tonight, though not as strong as the last couple.
 
A

anaron

Member
crackhead_bob said:
Honestly, I think 13 for hour long episodes would suffice, with 20 or so for half hour shows. HBO used to produce 13 episode seasons until they started expanding their concepts with shows like Deadwood and Carnivale. I wish HBO and Showtime could produce 16 episode seasons and then split them up like AMC has done with the Walking Dead these past 2 seasons.
Click to expand...

Oh, I was referring exclusively to this show. Though I too wish the standard 13 model still applied to HBO. In Enlightened's case however, I think 10 or 12 episodes is perfect for it. With Mike writing every single episode, I think the length of the season probably lends well to him keeping the show tighter and of such high quality.


That being said, 8 episodes is definitely too short and I know Mike White even wanted more from watching a Q&A he did.
 
E

Empty

Member
amy was being really two-faced like season 1 krista & friends for most of this episode it was so frustrating, but then the last five minutes where she has a moment of realization, talks about how she was deluding herself because of her own belief in everyone's goodness and the ensuing break up and meltdown just broke me. man. this show and laura dern are so good.

levi's scene in the cafe too ;_;

eight episodes is a crime. there's really loads of plot they need to fit into the finale, and i hope he can effectively maintain the feel of the show. especially if, god forbid, it's the last time we see the characters.

one thing i'd like to have seen is more of the other cogentiva employees' reactions to being laid off.
 
C

crackhead_bob

Member
Oh, I was referring exclusively to this show. Though I too wish the standard 13 model still applied to HBO. In Enlightened's case however, I think 10 or 12 episodes is perfect for it. With Mike writing every single episode, I think the length of the season probably lends well to him keeping the show tighter and of such high quality.


That being said, 8 episodes is definitely too short and I know Mike White even wanted more from watching a Q&A he did.
Click to expand...


I still can't get over the fact that this guy is the product of an evangelical upbringing. His father was a very influential figure in the evangelical right in the 1980's, ghostwriting for the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. When I think of the current crop of evangelical torch bearer like Franklin Graham, it amazes me that you have someone like Michael White who actually produces beautiful material. All of the evangelical writers who do stuff for TBN and what not produce utter crap, derived second hand from secular artists whom they tend to rip off. I can never see the appeal of Christian Rock, and there's probably a tangible reason why mainstream charts don't perceive them on the same level of commercial artists like The Beatles or Coldplay, for instance. You compare Little Richard and Chubby Checker to someone like Pat Boone for instance and you get the idea.....
 
G

gwynplaine

Banned
have to thank gaf for pointing me at this show.

i'm a peep show fan (watched all the episodes) and never felt bad at all about the characters getting into awkward situations like other fans said they do. i think this has been the only show that has caused an uneasy and stressful feeling in me, especially when i watch krista and amy talk to each other.

i like how all the episodes are tightly self contained too. her friend is great. nope she's not so great. or, rehab sucks, but it turns out it's not so bad. very basic but fulfilling storytelling that feels like something "got done" each episode.
 
A

anaron

Member
Empty said:
amy was being really two-faced like season 1 krista & friends for most of this episode it was so frustrating, but then the last five minutes where she has a moment of realization, talks about how she was deluding herself because of her own belief in everyone's goodness and the ensuing break up and meltdown just broke me. man. this show and laura dern are so good.

levi's scene in the cafe too ;_;

eight episodes is a crime. there's really loads of plot they need to fit into the finale, and i hope he can effectively maintain the feel of the show. especially if, god forbid, it's the last time we see the characters.

one thing i'd like to have seen is more of the other cogentiva employees' reactions to being laid off.
Click to expand...

And while it's supposed to be a great finale, it better damn well be a seasonal one. There's just SO MUCH I want to see that can't possibly be crammed into the next episode.

oh my god at Amy telling Krista though. I wonder how it's going to fuck her over. And tonight finally confirmed what most of us saw coming: Jeff's a total shit. I'm betting because of him dumping Amy, she's probably shifted entirely to Charles Zidon's (sp?) offering. Either way, there's no way this will end well for anyone and because of that, shit is about to get real.

My heart broke for the Cogentiva workers upon them hearing they're losing their jobs. Especially Connie. Was hoping we'd see Amy run after her so those two could share a scene together.
 
A

anaron

Member
AV Club: B

The real fundamental clash comes in what could have been a showcase showdown between Charles “End Times” Szidon and Amy “Rebirth” Jellicoe but ends up a still revealing barrage of one-shots. Their conversation begins innocuously enough—a “Loyalty is all” here, a strained fake laugh there—but these two aren’t playing around. Charles tells Amy that Abaddonn does good via charitable contributions. Amy calls bullshit and says her proposal is “about choosing to make ethics a priority.” He tells her, “If the rain stops falling and the crops die, the king will be killed.” He’s been hanging out with Dougie. She responds, “You’re not gonna be killed. You’re gonna get a $50,000,000 parachute and move to Pebble Beach or something.” Already it’s mesmerizing, at least conceptually. Here’s this laid-off worker in grand debate with her CEO, making him face up to lies the rich tell themselves. It could be a national catharsis. But then the conversation gets more Enlightened as Charles tells Amy what he really thinks: He looks out his window and sees a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a dog-eat-dog world of people fending for themselves. Amy sees an equally corrupt world, but she wants to change it. Charles Szidon just gives up and hoards wealth. And then he goes into this “Everything I did, I did for this family” kind of speech, which is a sharp rejoinder to the history of workplace sitcoms telling us offices are big, happy families as well as an obvious contradiction. Best of all, Charles tells Amy that accepting responsibility is important. Which promises to be a nice, little moral for both of them this season.
Click to expand...
 
E

Empty

Member
http://www.avclub.com/articles/enlightened-is-tvs-best-show-right-nowand-it-needs,92934/

av club wrote a nice piece on the overall greatness of the show, which is useful for other aspiring agents of change on twitter or facebook to share in order to easily explain why it's so good. (warning: it has a few allusions to events in the finale so give it a miss if you want to be 100% clean)

gwynplaine said:
have to thank gaf for pointing me at this show.

i'm a peep show fan (watched all the episodes) and never felt bad at all about the characters getting into awkward situations like other fans said they do. i think this has been the only show that has caused an uneasy and stressful feeling in me, especially when i watch krista and amy talk to each other.

i like how all the episodes are tightly self contained too. her friend is great. nope she's not so great. or, rehab sucks, but it turns out it's not so bad. very basic but fulfilling storytelling that feels like something "got done" each episode.
Click to expand...

welcome :)

interesting comparison with peep show, i definetely feel more uneasy watching this than peep show now. i think the uneasiness is because the show makes you care so much for the fates of the characters and it's positive enough to make you *really* believe things will get better. like contrast marks's cynical voiceovers with the optimism of amy's. i hate seeing amy or tyler hurt but sort of enjoy seeing mark and jez fuck up because they are so loathsome. well at least past season 1, when i first watched the show marks's initial flirtations with sophie and the phone message almost killed me :D
 
D

dead souls

Member
Goddamn, I guess Enlightened fans like the Oscars:

Enlightened (HBO)
-9:31 PM: 0.126 million viewers, 0.05 A18-49
-10:31 PM: 0.131 million viewers, 0.07 A18-49
 
R

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
dead souls said:
Goddamn, I guess Enlightened fans like the Oscars:

Enlightened (HBO)
-9:31 PM: 0.126 million viewers, 0.05 A18-49
-10:31 PM: 0.131 million viewers, 0.07 A18-49
Click to expand...

Season low right there, as well as one of the lowest rated episodes of the series. :/ Girls was really low rated Sunday night too though, so it's clear that HBO was impacted by the Oscars.
 
N

noobasuar

Banned
HBO already canceled their best show, Luck.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the dumb fucks in charge of this stuff cancel enlightened also. :(

Such a damn good show...
 
A

anaron

Member
noobasuar said:
HBO already canceled their best show, Luck.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the dumb fucks in charge of this stuff cancel enlightened also. :(

Such a damn good show...
Click to expand...

Well they cancelled Luck because of the controversy over, y'know, ALL OF THE HORSES DYING.
 
A

anaron

Member
Bladenic said:
Blame PETA, not HBO.
Click to expand...

I think it's more apt to blame "Luck" itself. Animals probably shouldn't be dying for the sake of entertainment.


Anyhow, back to Enlightened - Vulture: Mike White on Enlightened’s Tough Road to a Third Season and Why He Thinks Men Don’t Want to Watch Shows About Women

The first season was like a series of meditations. The second has a lot more plot. It’s not any less contemplative, but there’s a propulsive quality that wasn’t there before. What led to that?

Well, originally the first season was going to have the whistleblower stuff, but then I got caught up in the meditations. Then I realized as far as people coming to the show, it did have this take-it-or-leave-it quality. It wasn’t like, “I need to see what happens next week!” They were stand-alone episodes, there were digressions — I like all that, but I felt from a narrative point of view I needed to do my part to bring more people to the tent. Even though there were a lot of good reviews of the show, too, I felt like the encapsulation of it was “A character study of a polarizing kind of person.” Obviously there were a lot of people who, I don’t know, that was a turn-off for. I didn’t want to get away from that, but I wanted to figure out if there was a way to graft it together with something more serialized. From a writing point of view, it felt like a cool challenge.
Click to expand...



HBO ordered eight episodes, and last year you had ten. Do you wish you had gotten those extra two?

In a moment like this when we’re still trying to get more viewers, it sucks that we have eight. Because we’re going to end and we could keep building. But at the time? I had months before we started shooting the first season to write all the scripts, and when they picked us up for season two they waited until the last minute. There was a really short window to write it all before shooting. So at the time I thought it was for the best because there wasn’t a lot of time for more.

I’m being totally honest because I’m in this anxious place, but I’m afraid this will be the best thing I ever do. I think it will be. That it might be over is sad.

Why do you feel that way?
Well, the things that I like about the show are the way you can go deep on a character, the melancholy aspects. Whatever the show is, it’s very me. It’s what I’m into writing. And you can’t really do that in movies. You can’t keep deepening and deepening. You can make a deep movie, but you don’t have much time. If I had five more hours of The Good Girl it would be even cooler in my opinion. I’m worried because this was the best situation.

How so?
I mean, no one was telling me what to do. It’s like art or something. It sounds weird to say, but Enlightened’s more of a personal expression. And the conversation with HBO was never “Is this what people want? Is this appealing?” But even now, if I did another show with them, I feel like they might push me toward something more, I don’t know, not-Enlightened. Maybe down the road in another cycle I’ll be able to pull off something like this out there on this big a platform, but I’ve been doing this a long time, and it doesn’t happen often. You know what it’s like? It’s like I have this great shrink and now I’m having to switch. I don’t wanna have to start over and explain everything to a new shrink! I want to keep going deeper with this shrink.
Click to expand...
 
A

anaron

Member
RatskyWatsky said:
Gosh this is so depressing. :/ Poor Mike White.
Click to expand...

I think it'd be pretty fucking stupid of HBO not to renew it at this point. I mean, wouldn't it speak poorly for their reputation in providing the unrated and unconventional corner for quality programming if they cancelled what is definitely arguably their best show?

And I don't mean to sound ungrateful and/or entitled, I know Enlightened could only exist because of its amazing platform. But with the buzz and acclaim finally catching up to the show, cancelling it now seems really counterproductive in one way or another.
 
R

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
anaron said:
I think it'd be pretty fucking stupid of HBO not to renew it at this point. I mean, wouldn't it speak poorly for their reputation in providing the unrated and unconventional corner for quality programming if they cancelled what is definitely arguably their best show?

And I don't mean to sound ungrateful and/or entitled, I know Enlightened could only exist because of its amazing platform. But with the buzz and acclaim finally catching up to the show, cancelling it now seems really counterproductive in one way or another.
Click to expand...

I agree. I feel like the first season was renewed just by the skin of it's teeth (I'm not sure if that even makes sense), with only a tiny fraction of critics saying anything about the show at all, good or bad. And even then, that was apparently enough for HBO to renew.

But now the amount of critics lauding the show has increased tenfold (and they're not just lauding the show, they're lauding the show) and overall viewership is up. (HBO couldn't have been expecting much better anyway, considering that they aired the first season on a fucking Monday and this season Girls, which isn't very high rated to begin with, is its lead in) And on top of that I doubt it costs that much to produce. I realize that television is a business and not a charity, and that after a point it's just not worth it to keep producing content that loses money (if that is indeed the case. I don't know) but HBO has tons of money and I think that they can afford to keep a show like Enlightened - a show that adds a high level of prestige to their programming lineup - on the air. For at least one more season.
Maybe two. ;p
 
A

anaron

Member
RatskyWatsky said:
I agree. I feel like the first season was renewed just by the skin of it's teeth (I'm not sure if that even makes sense), with only a tiny fraction of critics saying anything about the show at all, good or bad. And even then, that was apparently enough for HBO to renew.

But now the amount of critics lauding the show has increased tenfold (and they're not just lauding the show, they're lauding the show) and overall viewership is up. (HBO couldn't have been expecting much better anyway, considering that they aired the first season on a fucking Monday and this season Girls, which isn't very high rated to begin with, is its lead in) And on top of that I doubt it costs that much to produce. I realize that television is a business and not a charity, and that after a point it's just not worth it to keep producing content that loses money (if that is indeed the case. I don't know) but HBO has tons of money and I think that they can afford to keep a show like Enlightened - a show that adds a high level of prestige to their programming lineup - on the air. For at least one more season.
Maybe two. ;p
Click to expand...

Exactly. And for the next
3
seasons, make sure they're each 10 episodes, thank yew.
 
E

Empty

Member
well it got its best press about half-way through the season. when it premiered everyone was all GIRLS GIRLS CULTURAL ZEITGEIST GIRLS GIRLS LENA DUNHAM GIRLS. i think a season break gives people a chance to catch up (there aren't many episodes really) and allows excitement to be built from before the start of the new season, now it has been embraced by the media as a genuinely excellent show.

then again it might be one of those shows that people just aren't interested in for whatever reason and despite my loud objections about how important it is, to most it probably doesn't have the intellectual cache of serious dramas about the american dream like the wire or mad men to work as a prestige show.

basically hbo plz. i love you don't let me down.
 
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