Greg Dixon: Olive Kitteridge: Bleak but full of laughs

Olive Kitteridge was the blackest of black comedies, and somehow the most hopeful of dramas.

I do hope they rescreen Olive Kitteridge. The HBO drama, which finished its four-part run on Sky's SoHo this week, should be made compulsory viewing for anyone with a family, which means, of course, all of us.

For me it was easily the television drama of the year. Better than Broadchurch, still a brilliant small-town murder mystery that managed, through fine performances and thoughtful direction, to not only be so much more than the usual plodding British plod drama but to make me think I should start tuning into TV One on Sunday nights again.

Olive Kitteridge was better, too, than the wonderful 10-parter Fargo, which also screened on SoHo. This, partly a spin-off from the Coen brothers' terrific film, was some of the best television fun I had this year, despite the high body count. Its drama went beyond grim in its view of humanity, yet it frequently made me laugh out loud. That's some trick.

I could say the same of Olive Kitteridge. As bleak as it could be, it was also funny as hell. Though it wasn't a comedy, it was the blackest of black comedies, and somehow the most hopeful of dramas. That's some trick, too.

Adapted from a book of short stories, these four hours of bleakness were almost without plot. Like life, it was more or less one thing after another, and not all of them good.

As the first episode opens, Olive, an old lady, goes into the woods near her Maine home, lays out a spotless tartan blanket, puts her portable radio on to a classical music station and then loads a revolver to shoot herself.

How and why she got to those woods was then explored by screenwriter Jane Anderson and director Lisa Cholodenko in flashback (beginning in the 1980s) with an almost forensic eye for the horrors of family life.

Olive, played by the great Frances McDormand with a hush and stillness masking a fire within, was an observer of life who didn't much like what she saw. We learn she is a high school teacher, a strict one, with a loving husband and a complicated son. She believes her boy is lazy and not living up to her view of his potential and she picks on him. She detests the sentiment and niceness in her husband Henry (a lovely, lovely turn by Richard Jenkins) too.

"I love you, Olly," he says.

"Yeah, you do Henry," she agrees.

She is rude, brittle and in a cold war with the parts of world she doesn't like or understand, which as time goes on is most of it. If you're not like her, then as far as she was concerned you're a "sap", her greatest insult.

Doesn't she sound awful? As she tells her loving husband, "You were born kind, you grew up kind and then you married a beast and loved her."

Yet she was not just a beast. Of course not. And, like Henry, you can't help but love her, beastliness and all.

I am loath to give too much more of her life away because I really hope you see this if you haven't already done so.

I can say that in the first episode, two unrequited loves end badly. In the second there is a wedding and a young man who comes home to kill himself. In the third a frightening incident leads to unexpressed, unpleasant truths being spoken out loud.

And in the final episode, well I shouldn't say any more - just that this was a drama that will live long in my memory. Make sure you seeit.

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