Every episode of Bunheads, which I wrote about in Issue 9, contains at least one performance—some interpolated into the narrative action, others standing alone as a dream sequence or some more abstract indicator of an emotional state. These songs and dances have come to be the signature flourish of the show. Unlike those on, say, […]
Few shows are so recklessly obvious about their goal of wish fulfillment as to actually name the fictional setting Paradise. Bunheads, however, is not like most of American television’s offerings.
When Enlightened premiered at the end of 2011, its parent network, HBO, promoted it under slightly false pretenses: There was Laura Dern—her mascara smeared, her mouth contorted into an expression somewhere between a heaving sob and a rageful shriek—as “the new face of tranquility.” It played the cognitive dissonance for laughs, setting up a slapstick show that would play off Dern’s endlessly pliable face in order to heighten its inner tension.