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Amazon Crimes

 Amy Jellicoe, my favorite character in all of TV history, and the focus of "Enlightened," works for a careless, wealthy corporation called "Abaddonn" (which sounds just a bit like "Amazon").

Amy is a "buyer" for "Health and Wellness," and this is a coveted position, but Amy has made some unwise choices recently. She is shtupping her boss, Damon (and this is a name that means "to tame, to subdue")....To save his marriage, Damon has brutally detached himself from Amy. Workplace conduct has suffered; Amy is now on her way out, for some kind of rehabilitation.

The series opens with one of the most viscerally thrilling moments in TV Land. Amy is weeping on a corporate toilet; while weeping, she overhears "friends" gossiping about her. ("Shit where you eat, and what do you think will happen?") Enraged, Amy throws herself out of the stall, screams at her colleagues, then struts down a warpath, a corporate hallway. Mascara streams down her cheeks. A frenemy whispers, "You look crazy...." and Amy offers a dismissive, almost-violent retort. She confronts Damon as he enters an elevator. "WE FUCKED, OK? Get over it."

Damon, mortified, hisses that he is "with clients right now."

Then, in the great climax, Amy forcibly reopens the elevator door. She actually wrenches the door off its track, with her bare hands. Looking straight at the camera (at Damon), she bellows like a dying animal. And we begin. It's just the start of a game-changing performance, a piece of work without vanity, the moment the world said, "Gosh, I think Laura Dern--for one reason or another--will ultimately find herself with an Academy Award."

Amy then spends weeks at a kind of Esalen, but in Hawaii, and in a way, the self-help bromides may be useful, but in a way, perhaps the self-help stuff has just taught Amy to put all her old noxious, narcissistic habits in a slightly more (superficially) pleasing shell. As Amy tries to be better, and to be candid with herself and with the world, we're on the edge of our seats. The journey is painful, and relatable, and almost shockingly grim, even for HBO--and it's very, very funny.

"We can be agents of change," Amy says to her uninterested Amazon colleagues. "We can stop raping the land and--you know--poisoning children."

I can't think of a better show on television.

P.S. Many writers get the spelling of "Abaddonn" wrong. Also: there seems to be a reference here to "the god of destruction."
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