While shows with female leads like 30 Rock and Girls never boast ratings that reflect anything close to the weekly word count expended in their honor, they also weren’t completely ignored by the public. Enlightened, for the most part, was. There were several reasons for this, including the show’s slow pacing, the lack of an easy, universal “point,” the subtlety of the humor, and the intentionally unremarkable lives of all the characters. But above all these things, I believe that the viewing public just wasn’t ready to watch an older, neurotic woman try to sort out her problems in an earnest, scattered, and oftentimes maddeningly awkward way. And when the first season ended and Amy Jellicoe hadn’t gotten much better or much worse, the show crossed over into the narrative structure of our real, sad lives. Nobody wants to watch that on TV.
— Grantland, no: 30 Rock and Girls were set in New York, so they were obviously more important to the way we live now, and the media chattering class that needs something to chatter about could easily latch onto it. Enlightened, on the other hand, involved California: squishy New Age thoughts - and the last New Age thing to grab onto the consciousness, Eat Pray Love (which did not blow up until its paperback release, through word of mouth) and other stuff of its ilk, Oprah-approved, was a fable with a happy ending - grafted onto a slightly miserablist, ironic 90s indie movie vibe. The latter is obviously a harder sell than something where there are boobs and transgressive sex scenes, and from what I could tell, HBO barely spent any money on promoting the show correctly (why would you depend on TV critics, TV critics who “saved Chuck,” who are very slow to cotton onto anything that isn’t set in New York right away? The chattering class only started caring about Breaking Bad, initially popular in the southwest, where it is set, on or around the end of season 3/beginning of season 4; right around the time that Mad Men had its epic hiatus). And another sign of neglect: anytime I was at a friend’s house where they had HBO, Enlightened wasn’t available On Demand. Whereas I could always watch Girls. (I have no doubt that HBO bought the respective Golden Globes for Enlightened and Girls, btw. Golden Globes historically slide by on charm.) I imagine when HBO sent Emmy DVDs out, Girls was in a gold-encrusted box with Deborah Lippman nail polish inside while Enlightened was probably just a slip of paper with a link to watch it online, somewhere, only if you knew the passcode. It’s really too bad, I feel like Enlightened at the least was about to reach Peak Think Piece if there was a season three, and I wanted to write one!
Source: http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-pr...