Entertainment

Crazy heart

You’d have to be halfnuts to dislike “Enlightened,” HBO’s over-the-edge dramedy beginning tonight.

Not to sound crazy, but the other half of you would be nuts to like “Enlightened.”

This engagingly uncomfortable series is not like anything you’ve seen before. Well, that is, unless you, too, have had a corporate meltdown with disastrous results, found enlightenment afterward and then headed back to the horrors of corporate life thinking everyone will sing “Kumbaya” with you around the corpfire.

The divine Laura Dern is Amy, the “health and beauty” buyer for “Abaddonn” (it comes from the Greek for “place of destruction” — I looked it up), a multinational consumer-products company.

After an affair gone bad with her married boss, Damon (Charles Esten), Amy is tranferred out of her job and goes ballistic all over Damon’s sorry butt, screaming, cursing and generally wrecking her makeup. A beauty buyer should know to always use waterproof mascara — just in case!

Amy goes off to a place called “Open Air” in Hawaii, where she finds her inner truth, sings around the campfire and has a spiritual experience with a swimming tortoise.

She returns to Riverside, Calif., a newly hinged and spiritually enlightened person. She is ready to help her corporation go green instead of “raping the land and drugging America’s children!”

Right. Her suggestions are as welcome as she is, and when she threatens to bring a lawsuit for firing someone who has been in treatment, she’s given a job on “H” floor.

This is the windowless basement filled with other misfits whom the company also wasn’t allowed to fire.

She punches numbers instead of punching her old boyfriend, her old assistant who has taken her job and her ex, Levi (Luke Wilson), who thinks the only road to enlightenment is through his nose.

Then, there are the insanely offbeat and sometimes hilarious misfit co-workers, including socially inept Tyler, who is played by the show’s co-creator, Mike White, and her new inappropriate boss, Dougie, played by Timm Sharp.

Dougie is the guy every office worker knows well — the one who only speaks in a TV announcer voice that he thinks is funny. Turns out, when you’re not stuck with him in real life, it is hilarious.

Amy’s mother, played by Dern’s real-life mom, the divine Diane Ladd, is less happy to have her home than the corporation is to have her back. In fact, the last thing she wants to be is, well, enlightened.

I don’t know who exactly the audience will be for this show, because it’s really an out-there mix of a woman past the verge who has found a better, more spiritual way, but one who is always about to rage at the unreality of her corporate reality.

Raging craziness tends to get in the way of her spiritual growth.

Give this one at least two episodes before you decide it’s too nuts for you.