Critic Reviews

McDormand will win an Emmy for this. Already, there's no contest.... Cholodenko's direction is masterful, and so is the bleakly funny script by Jane Anderson, but they clearly have a vision that is both part of--and separate from--the source material.

It's an honest tearjerker that treats its characters with respect, according them a great sense of wounded, tattered dignity.

There are many things that Olive Kitteridge gets right, but none so significant as how brilliantly it simultaneously captures the deep, pervasive stillness and the close, suffocating entanglement of small-town living.

Olive Kitteridge explores Tolstoy’s notion that every family is unhappy in its own way, making the particular unhappiness of the Kitteridges universal through a magical combination of great direction, writing and performances. You’ll not soon forget Olive Kitteridge, the woman or the mini-series.

A quietly captivating miniseries about a seldom-quiet woman.

Like the extraordinary Elizabeth Strout novel-in-stories that it’s based on, HBO’s Olive Kitteridge accumulates with steady, earned drama into a searing portrait of quiet desperation. It’s sad, unsentimental, and lovely.

McDormand's portrayal of Olive Kitteridge is even more accomplished, in turns aggravating and affecting while always seeming just right. Jenkins is likewise superb.... This is a nuanced, slowly simmering look at bent and spindled lives molded by previous bent and spindled lives. The bright spots are there, but never glowing. Self-realization is the payoff.

[A] lovely, ruthless, masterfully restrained two-night, four-hour contemplation of love, marriage, parenthood, mental illness and identity.

The program works so well as curdled Americana, you might not be inclined to peel back the other layers, much less delve into what’s happening at a storytelling level (which is even more impressive); but that’s a part of what makes Olive Kitteridge so pleasurable: its unobtrusive ambition.

HBO’s deeply involving and completely draining miniseries.