Enlightened grew by leaps and bounds last night, with a poignant episode about perspective, and how it can be skewered when we’re down on life. The previous episode of Enlightened hardly excited me with the introduction of a goofy workplace cast and a meandering plot about change, but this episode grounded itself in a single, powerfully honest scene. After visiting a homeless shelter and interviewing for an administrative position there, Amy breaks down when she finds out the paltry salary she’d earn at the job. But its not for material reasons she can’t take the job; it simply isn’t economically feasible, with no home of her own and the huge debt from the life-changing treatment she went through hanging over her head. So she breaks down, and admits the feeling of being trapped, feeling like there is nothing.

And then the manager of the shelter reminds her: “You have a lot.”

In an episode full of Amy trying to displace herself from her reality (trying to get the job that will quickly make her feel better, trying to forget everything that happened while nobody else around her will, living vicariously in the life of her former assistant as she lies in bed at night), at that moment, Enlightened made an important point about the consuming, self-serving attitude we take towards our adult lives: we don’t appreciate. Our lives get clouded by financial and physical limitations, and we proclaim ourselves victims of a cruel world. But like Amy, take a moment to think of the lives of the people around us. We are all secluded, we are all struggling in some way, internal or external, and wallowing in what we’ve done or where we are in life isn’t going to drive us forward, it’s just going to keep us in the same shitty cycle.

It ended on a bit of a predictable note, but the scene at the homeless shelter revealed the growing cohesion of co-creator (he also plays Tyler) Mike White and his writing team, and a feeling they are beginning to hit their stride in terms of what they are doing with this show. This is a show about change at its heart (and should remain so), but it’s not necessarily the big changes which make the big differences in our lives. In Amy’s case, with her $24,000 bill sitting in her mailbox, that change for the better has done equal damage.

There are still many pieces of Enlightened that may or may not work: Amy’s relationship with her mother needs to be fleshed out, because I’m not so sure all the time why her mother is so negative, and it affects the impact of their scenes together. But this week’s episode was a major step in the right direction dramatically (the humor is still quite inconsistent, and what appear to be jokes often fall flat), and next week will shed some light on the show’s biggest wild card so far: the relationship between Amy and her ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson). Make no mistake: their relationship needs to be the centerpiece of this show, and next week’s episode will go a long way in determining how much we invest into the emotional core of the show moving forward.

What did you think? Stop back next Tuesday to read a recap of “The Weekend”.

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