Via: Tuned In
“It’s OK to be a ghost. It has its pleasures. You’re light. You slip in and out, unseen. There’s no love to lose or burden to be. You have so little to hold you down. You are free.” As an actor, Mike White is what you might call very “specific.” He plays characters who are shy, awkward, tentative–OK, honestly, a little creepy. Fortunately, Mike White the actor is very good friends with Mike White the writer, who has written him several roles of that very type: as the emotionally arrested stalker in Chuck and Buck, a Bible-studying security guard in The Good Girl, and now, as Tyler in Enlightened. As the whistleblower subplot has developed in the second season, his role has grown, and in “The Ghost Is Seen,” he got, if not a solo episode as Levi did two weeks ago, a showcase for the pale, furtive thing that is his personality. One thing I love about the way White has written Tyler is that there’s no pity or ennoblement in the depiction, as you might expect of a character who is (a) an underdog and (b) played by the writer. Tyler’s sympathetic, but he’s not a saint or a sweetheart. He frames a coworker to get fired after the guy insults him. He has a one-night stand that goes bad and changes his password to “Julie_bitch.” He resists blowing the whistle on his company’s wrongdoing because he’s comfortable and just inherited a two-week timeshare. He downloads a crapload of illegal music. Which doesn’t make him a bad person, either: he’s just, like most characters in Enlightened, trying the best he can, and White gives him the dignity of being both a good guy and a jerk at times. His defensiveness and withdrawal are learned mechanisms. And in “The Ghost Is Seen,” he tries to unlearn that, for the sake of the plan and for the sake of joining the living. White pairs Tyler with a another wallflower, executive assistant Eileen, played by Molly Shannon (whom White directed in
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: February 11th, 2013
Comments
No comments, be the first to add one below!
You must login to post a comment!