Can’t get enough White Lotus? Watch this underrated cult hit from its creator

A white woman retreats to Hawaii in search of wellness. Relationships unravel. Addiction issues. Unnerving familial relationships. And it’s written and directed by Mike White? No, I’m not referring to The White Lotus. This is Enlightened, an under-watched but critically acclaimed series that White created with Laura Dern, first airing on HBO in 2011.

Though it certainly has its differences, Enlightened is in many ways a precursor to The White Lotus, examining spirituality, wellness and privilege. Unfortunately, the series’ offbeat storylines and complex, strange characters didn’t quite land the same with audiences as White’s later work. The show was cancelled after its second season.

But the good news is this cult hit is still streaming. If you are a greedy little piggy for more Mike White content between episodes of The White Lotus, you don’t have to wait.

Laura Dern in Enlightened, the HBO show she made with Mike White. Credit: HBO

What’s it about?

Instead of idyllic Koh Samui or Sicily, Enlightened is mostly situated in the bland corporate world of Abaddon Industries. Dern plays the lead character, Amy Jellicoe, a woman in her 40s who – after suffering a very public breakdown in the office – goes to a rehabilitative retreat in Hawaii. After swimming with the turtles, she returns home full of newfound spiritual optimism.

Newly “fixed”, Amy wants to fix the lives of the people around her, starting with her mother, Helen (played by Dern’s actual mum, Diane Ladd), and troubled ex-husband, Levi (Luke Wilson). In other words, she is anyone you’ve ever spoken to who claims to be a new person after a silent meditation retreat.

“I give it two months tops,” Levi says. But Amy resolutely retains the naive optimism of her self-help books (Flow Through Your Rage; Change. Now or Never!)

Writer Mike White (centre) also stars in Enlightened.Credit: HBO

Upon her return to Abaddon, Amy is demoted to a data processing job on the “H floor” with a cast of downtrodden characters, including middle manager Dougie (Timm Sharp) and shy-but-endearing Tyler, played by Mike White. These interactions in the basement level sit somewhere between Severance and The Office. As the show progresses, Amy turns her attention to enacting change in her workplace, eventually becoming a corporate whistleblower.

In the final scene of the pilot – evoking the aspirational and highly filtered early days of Instagram – Amy walks in slow-motion through a throng of suited men in a bright yellow dress, Regina Spektor playing in the background. “I will change, and I will be an agent of change,” she says via dreamy voiceover.

Amy is a now-familiar character in the Mike White universe: a privileged woman obsessed with self-betterment. She’s disillusioned yet dependent on the trappings of modern life. She’s relatable. She’s deeply, deeply cringey. But as it continues, the show reveals itself to be more than what’s on the shiny, new-age label.

That is signature White. He creates cringeworthy characters you can’t turn away from, characters who start off as caricatures but become more complex (though arguably less so if they’re not white). Consider the very recent example of White Lotus’ Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger): a seemingly one-dimensional corporate gym bro whose sexual bravado gives way to something much more complex and is set psychically adrift in his work life.

Why didn’t people watch it at the time?

Enlightened’s viewership was small but committed. Critics raved about it – and praised Laura Dern’s character in particular. Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker: “You could see Amy Jellicoe as a gender flip on Larry David: she’s another Californian liberal who wants, and fails, to be good.” Dern won a Golden Globe for the performance in 2012. But the series never found mass audience appeal. Entertainment Weekly perhaps best summarised it as: “the best show nobody’s watching”.

Despite the critical response and the accolades, Enlightened was a difficult sell. It wasn’t “built to be buzzed about”, as critic Emily Yoshida wrote at the time, “particularly not in the way we buzz about things in 2013”.

“Though it is/was among the most smartly plotted shows on TV, its storytelling rhythm worked in waves rather than peaks and valley,” she wrote. Two other reasons it didn’t get much love: “Nobody gets naked” and “Nobody gets killed”.

White was aware of all this. In 2013, he told an interviewer that the show was “problematic” for HBO. Instead of straight-up satire, “as you get deeper into the characters, it becomes much more emotional”.

What can Enlightened tell us about The White Lotus?

More than a decade since Enlightened ended, White appears to be consumed with many of the same existential questions. The third season of The White Lotus, in particular, is full of privileged people seeking higher meaning. This is most obvious in Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook), who has dragged her entire family to Thailand under the guise of thesis research to suss out a year-long Buddhist retreat.

And, like Enlightened, The White Lotus’ third season is full of characters who have a striking disconnect between self-perception and reality. Take the trio of female “friends”: Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie are desperate to project their ideal selves and their ideal friendship – ultimately to no avail. I half expected to see Amy Jellicoe popping up as Jaclyn’s former roommate to tell them: “People are living under the illusion that the American dream is working for them.”

In The White Lotus, though, no one is really trying to change the world for good. As much as Piper is written as someone with a moral compass, she’s also a product of her privilege. She’s unlikely to take aim at the hotel franchise for any corporate wrongdoing.

Some viewers have criticised this season as slow or stale; the resort-bound characters feel stuck in similar patterns of behaviour. But if Enlightened is anything to go by, Mike White’s characters are capable of change. They’re also – and this is important – chaotic. Either way, it’s entertaining.

Enlightened is streaming on Max; The White Lotus is on Binge and Max.

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