I hope you  spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO’s Olive Kitteridge instead. I’d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn’t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle, where she had an innovative, meaty role.

Olive Kitteridge will be playing on HBO (2 parts) numerous times in coming weeks, so if you missed it the first time, try to catch it. Just for the acting alone, it’s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I’d read the book, so was prepared for Olive’s prickly personality. She’s likely not someone you’d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans calls the production “maybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.”

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others’ feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature—someone who truly won’t bother to be likeable. “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,” a character in the book says. Her father’s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn’t seem so. And just when you’re about to give up on her, she’ll do something remarkable.