Season 2 of 'Sorry For Your Loss' Debuts on Facebook Watch
For obvious reasons, few TV shows focus on grief. It tends to feel, well, depressing.
Sorry For Your Loss, whose second season premieres Tuesday on Facebook Watch, does focus on grief and sometimes it does feel depressing.
At the same time, it feels honest. The grief feels honest. The storyline feels pumped up into a television-style drama, but Elizabeth Olsen's (top) Leigh Shaw, our central character, conveys in a moving way the total, utter, all-consuming ache of suddenly losing the most important person in your life.
It doesn't make for bouncy, upbeat drama. It's not even the currently popular dramedy, though it has light moments. It's a look at hurt and, perhaps, healing, though that does not arrive in any neat, linear fashion.
Leigh's husband, Matt Shaw (Mamoudou Athie), an aspiring comic book artist, went hiking one day. His body was found at the bottom of a 42-foot drop. Leigh knows little more than that, leaving open the possibility – remote, but not ruled out – that this was not an accident.
With the possibility it might never be answered, that kind of dangling question makes moving on that much harder.
Having been fully in love with Matt, his death knocked Leigh flat, of course. She quit her job as a website advice columnist and took a job as an exercise instructor at the studio run by her mother Amy (Janet McTeer).
She also moved back home with Mom, which put her in more regular contact with her sister Jules (Kelly Marie Tran).
Leigh and Mom have a sort of edgy relationship since Mom has her own issues. So does Jules, a recovering alcoholic who also teaches at Mom's studio and who has long felt she lived in Leigh's shadow.
Leigh's homelife frames her more serious problem, which is Matt's brother, Danny (Jovan Adepo).
Danny's a smart guy who loves surfing and has a seemingly terrific job. When Matt was alive, they were devoted to each other and argued all the time, sometimes about Leigh. For reasons that were only hinted at, Danny didn't seem to like her.
After Matt died, Leigh hoped she and Danny could share some of the burden, a thought that didn't go anywhere near the direction she envisioned.
Like Milo Ventimiglia on This Is Us, Matt gets almost as much screen time dead as he might have gotten if he stayed alive. When we're not flashing back, Leigh is finding that Matt's phone contains relevant and disturbing messages and is arranging to have his comic book posthumously published.
So Matt remains very much with us, and as the second season begins, Leigh is trying to sort all this out with a puzzlingly resistant Danny.
She's also trying to keep her hand in the writing game by thinking up quickie pop culture quizzes for her long-time friend Drew Burmester (Zack Robidas), who runs the website for which she used to write the advice column.
At one point, she asks Drew if she could do some actual writing, and he tells her no, sorry, the site can only use "sad, empty clickbait."
So, you see, there is a light side.
Sorry For Your Loss looks at the toughest possible moment for a likeable person who is not responsible for the terrible thing that has blown up her life. Its details probably don't match the details of anyone who is watching, but the show resonates because her challenge has been and is shared by millions – as is the feeling she's walking down a blind alley with no idea what could lie ahead.