{"id":3742,"date":"2014-11-06T07:43:53","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T12:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3742"},"modified":"2015-01-03T07:45:24","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T12:45:24","slug":"olive-kitteridge-on-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3742","title":{"rendered":"Olive Kitteridge: on TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Olive<\/a>I hope you\u00a0 spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley<\/em> on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO\u2019s Olive Kitteridge<\/em><\/a> instead. I\u2019d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn\u2019t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle<\/em>, where she had an innovative, meaty role.<\/p>\n

Olive Kitteridge<\/em> 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\u2019s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I\u2019d read the book, so was prepared for Olive\u2019s prickly personality<\/a>. She\u2019s likely not someone you\u2019d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans<\/a> calls the production \u201cmaybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why <\/em>was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others\u2019 feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature\u2014someone who truly won\u2019t bother to be likeable. \u201cOlive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,\u201d a character in the book says. Her father\u2019s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn\u2019t seem so. And just when you\u2019re about to give up on her, she\u2019ll do something remarkable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hope you\u00a0 spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO\u2019s Olive Kitteridge instead. I\u2019d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Olive Kitteridge: on TV","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[269,61,67,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actor","category-character","category-television","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-Ym","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3743,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions\/3743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}