Review: Sorry For Your Loss on Facebook Watch (season 1)
Review: Sorry For Your Loss on Facebook Watch (season 1)
Good grief, this show has all the quality and best elements of an independent film.
Good grief, this show has all the quality and best elements of an independent film.
I do have to question what Facebook thinks they’re doing with Facebook Watch. I suspect this little content creation experiment of theirs will fizzle out soon enough. However, Sorry For Your Loss could make an argument for them to stay in it.
I like to refer to a show like Sorry For Your Loss as a “kitchen sink” show; meaning that there are A LOT of things going on in the show.
Thankfully, this show makes it all work.
Now it’s both reductive and dismissive to think of Sorry For Your Loss as just a “web series” or “show for the internet” because it’s on Facebook Watch— this is as much of a “web series” as Peaky Blinders or Fleabag.
Regardless of platform, this is a very powerful and effective show.
Created by playwright Kit Steinkellner and starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sorry For Your Loss tackles some pretty weighty issues. Chief among them, the loss and questionable death of a spouse.
But wait, there’s even more loss — the show has addiction, divorce, adoption, recovery, infidelity, race, mental health, LQBTQ, etc. (ergo, my “kitchen sink” moniker.) Miraculously, the writing is so adroit that it all works and nothing overpowers the central theme of loss.
As good as the writing is, this is all Elizabeth Olsen.
Beginning with her first feature film, Martha May Marcy Marlene, Olsen has proven she’s got some serious acting chops. I think because of that she’s made interesting creative choices. Moving from indie films like Martha May Marcy Marlene to drama’s like Wind River to big-budget comic book movies in the Marvel Universe portraying Scarlet Witch.
Each performance, whether starring or supporting, is evidence of just how good she is. Sorry For Your Loss is a nice addition to an already impressive and rapidly growing CV.
In this show, Elizabeth Olsen plays Leigh Shaw, an advice columnist who wants to be a writer, who is married to Mamoudou Athie’s Matt Greer, a high school teacher who wants to be a comic book writer. Greer is the character who dies and as the ten episodes unfold, it becomes increasingly questionable as to whether his fall off a cliff while hiking was accidental or deliberate. You see, Greer battles depression and at the time of his death is experiencing a depressive episode.
And on this front, the show portrays depression very well and keeps it rooted in the reality of the disease. One of the better lines comes around episode eight or nine. Leigh is sitting on the stoop with Matt’s brother Danny and she re-tells the story of someone from her grief group by saying, “He didn’t kill himself, the disease killed him.” And if you or you know someone with depression, that’s the truth.
Depression is a disease. And like many diseases, it kills.
The other thing this show does spectacularly well is its normalization of interracial marriage. What I mean by that is that there I have no recollection of race being mentioned in the first season — Olsen’s Leigh is white and Athi’s Matt is black.
I’ve always felt the European shows handle interracial relationships much better than we do here in the states. This is the first time I can recall seeing it portrayed so benignly.
The show treats interracial marriage as it should be — a non-issue.
Sorry For Your Loss is following a trend of late, the toggling between past and present. Here it reminded me of the use of flashbacks in Unbelievable. This can be irritating at first, however, once you become acclimated, it can be a useful narrative device. Used effectively, it can integrate you into the story even more, as it does here.
The one area that this time interplay falters is in the portrayal of Matt’s depressive episode which important in the structure of the show. On the one hand, I think the toggling here removed some of what was happening with the character that may have led to the episode.
On the other hand, it could just as easily be argued that was the point. An event may not always be the instigator in a depressive episode. In either case, it’s not so disruptive here that you can’t put it together.
But again, be it past or present, the central theme of Sorry For Your Loss is a loss of someone or something:
Leigh (Elizabeth Olsen) and her loss of her husband Matt (Mamoudou Athie)
Matt’s brother Danny (Jovan Adep) and his loss of an older brother
Leigh’s adopted sister Jules (Kelly Marie) and her loss of loss drinking
Leigh’s mother Amy (Janet McTeer) and the potential loss of her business
Leigh’s father Richard (Don McManus) and his loss of love for his second wife as he attempts a reconciliation with his first wife, and Leigh’s mother, Amy
Leigh’s stepmother Sabrina (Carmen Cusak) and her loss of love for her husband Richard
Reading it like that may look like the show is a real bummer. The show isn’t a modern life portrayal via Albert Camus with a soundtrack by The Smiths. It’s not that at all. There are moments of levity — enough so that it doesn’t diminish the reality, and gravity, that accompanies significant loss.
Sorry For Your Loss captures some real aspects of modern life…and loss is a part of life. The show also goes to great length to show how significant loss can cast its shadow over many. And how such loss can create a rudderless effect on those at the center and the periphery.
While I have never seen This Is Us on NBC, I think there may be some content similarity between the shows. However, Sorry For Your Loss probably has a fraction of the budget. Which aligns it more with independent cinema and those things that make really good independent films— the writing, acting and directing.
By all accounts, This Is Us has similar strengths. But again, much like independent films, to be competitive, Sorry For Your Loss has to deliver the same quality, if not better, with fewer resources. NBC is in the content creation business, it’s what they do. Facebook is not in the content creation business.
Facebook is for television clips, not television shows.
The stars were in alignment for Sorry For Your Loss. It’ll be interesting to see if Facebook can do it again with another show.
The fact is that Sorry For Your Loss is on Facebook Watch and it’s hurting it. The show deserves more attention than it’s getting solely because it’s on a platform used for…whatever people use it for these days. The show seems to be overlooked. And it shouldn’t be.
While I can applaud Facebook’s effort, in this case, I think it speaks more to the creative team and less to the platform. The cold hard fact is that Facebook will never be a competitive player in content creation. Period.
If Sorry For Your Loss was on any other streamer, it would be getting loads of attention and awards recognition for the writing, the cast and the direction. It’s that good. However, on Facebook Watch, it’s lost among the other noise on that bukkake of a social platform.
In the spirit of full disclosure, even I didn’t watch it on Facebook. I’d known about the show for months but I have neither the time nor inclination to go hunting on Facebook to find their shows. I discovered it on a long flight home and watched it there…and still haven’t popped on Facebook to look for it.
There isn’t anything revolutionary about Sorry For Your Loss, it’s just a supremely well-crafted show. That said, I could give you a dozen different reasons to watch Sorry For Your Loss but the fact is you only need two — the writing and Elizabeth Olsen.
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