Photo: Laura Dern and Luke Wilson in ‘Enlightened.’ Credit: Lacey Terrell / HBO
Say it ain’t so! This Sunday, March 3, marks the season finale of Enlightened, one of the best (and most under-appreciated) comedies on television. And already, fans are starting to worry: Will this be the end of the show?
“Last season, I was like, we’ve got to end this with as big of a cliffhanger as we possibly can, just so that people will want to see how it all plays out,” the show’s creator, Mike White, told EW before the second season began. “And I wanted to do that again this year. But I did feel like, if we don’t build our audience and there is a chance that this show won’t come back, I wanted it to feel complete. I was hedging my bets, I guess.” (This season’s premiere earned only earned 609,000 viewers over three plays, though that’s slightly up from last season. HBO has not announced whether the series will live to see a third season.)
Without spoiling anything, let’s just say that this season finale is all kinds of heartbreaking, and not just because the episode is so good that you won’t want it to end. As Amy (Laura Dern) and Los Angeles Times scribe Jeff (Dermott Mulroney) prepare to publish their big exposé about Abbadonn, everyone’s starting to get nervous. Abbadonn’s shy programming drone Tyler (Mike White) knows that his relationship with Eileen (Molly Shannon), the boss’s secretary, will be over as soon as the story breaks, and he wants Amy to stop the story from running. Meanwhile, a new opportunity comes up that makes Amy question what’s really the best way to save the world: by working within the system or by burning everything down.
