The actress radiates steely grace in this elegant half-hour show about grief—airing on Facebook, of all platforms.
Olsen expertly portrays the tangible struggle of Leigh’s everyday life. Creator Kit Steinkellner and show-runner Lizzy Weiss’s interpretation of grief is not the face-crumply overacting of constant sobbing, or the self-destructive spirals of addiction or vice one often sees in prestige dramas. Instead, Olsen is a wry, cynical, taut widow—grieving with a steely edge that belies the popular conception of what mourning is supposed to look like. In the third episode, Leigh is frustrated by another woman in grief counseling, whose whimpering tears and bland platitudes seem to be performing the myth of mourning to perfection; along the way, she encapsulates her own character with a flourish. “You’re Jackie O,” she says, with irritation, to the other woman. “I’m Courtney Love.”
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Tran lends Jules a sparkling charm that belies deeper anxieties, because as is revealed a few episodes in, Jules is fresh out of rehab for narcotics. The mingled worry, love, and resentment Jules’s addiction has created for her mother and older sister is one of the most realistic portrayals of familial bonds I’ve seen in a while—a tangled dynamic that alternately infantilizes Jules and then punishes her for enacting what others expect of her.
by Sonia Saraiya
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