Olive Kitteridge (Season 1)

Olive Kitteridge (2014) is an HBO limited series you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Lisa Cholodenko from Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Four episodes trace twenty-five years in a quiet coastal Maine town, where quiet turns out to be the wrong word.

Frances McDormand plays Olive, a retired math teacher who has a talent for saying the thing that cuts deepest. She's difficult with her pharmacist husband Henry (Richard Jenkins), with her son Christopher who grew up resenting her, and with every neighbour who makes the mistake of needing too much from her. McDormand doesn't soften the character — and that's precisely what makes it hurt. Bill Murray turns up in the final episodes and somehow makes everything stranger and sadder at once.

The series took eight Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for McDormand. It's a portrait of a woman who is neither villain nor victim, just someone who finds ordinary life unbearably heavy. Stream Olive Kitteridge online on iFILM.