Quote of the Day

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Burn it down! The Playlist wrote up a wish-list of the ten things they most want to get Emmy nominations, and there's plenty I agree with (Alfie Allen is doing a terrific job as Theon on Game of Thrones, and the five minutes of Mad Men I watched this past season were wowza for Christina Hendricks) but it's their number one choice that I'm just gonna go ahead and plop down here their entire argument for, because I couldn't agree more with every single syllable and I'm pretty sure I was so re-juiced after reading this that I'll go home and start watching the entire season again. (Oh my god when is the second season going to happen, I neeeeeed it now.)

1. Best Actress in a Comedy: Laura Dern, "Enlightened"

It’s a shame Mike White’s “Enlightened” escaped all the auteurist buzz that surrounds “Louie” and “Girls.” His sensitive exploration of the crazy-making, anti-humanist contradictions of modern city life, from corporate technocracy to grassroots politics and beyond, revolves around the most burrowing television performance since Tony Soprano. Laura Dern’s Amy Jellicoe is a narcissist extraordinaire, and Dern plays plausible deniability like a Wall Street CFO. The show depends on that mystery of authenticity -- the question of how self-aware Amy is could occupy the Supreme Court for a whole session. But the general answer is obvious: Amy lives in a constant state of flux between all the show’s central dichotomies, including sympathetic pawn and unsympathetic manipulator. You can’t pin her down because she’s not your average TV character, a pithy game-piece in a simplistic cause-and-effect narrative. She’s fuller than that, more self-contradictory, more unknowable, and not out of ass-covering writerly vagueness but rather Dern’s digging. On a network dedicated to static female antiheroes reveling in bad behavior to piss off Mom, Dern keeps finding new expressions for the raw material of her physicality, all motivated by Amy’s sincere if hesitant attempts to grow. In short, Laura Dern burns through her character like a star. Here’s hoping the Emmys take notice.

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