In the opening episode of Sorry For Your Loss, we never learn why Matt Greer (Mamoudou Athie, top) died at a tragically young age.

We only know that he’s gone and that his wife Leigh (Elizabeth Olsen, top) has watched her own life shatter into a thousand pieces like a light bulb dropped onto a hard, tile floor.

She has about the same odds, she thinks, of putting it back together.

At this point, we should mention that Sorry For Your Loss, whose first four episodes premiere Thursday on the streaming service Facebook Watch, is billed as a comedy.

Okay, a dark comedy.

And did we mention it’s also one of the best new shows of what used to be called the Fall Season?

Olsen, best known these days as the Scarlet Witch in multiple Marvel films, gives a compelling performance in a very different role. She’s swapped the theatrical grandeur of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a stripped-down, subdued, and painfully wounded Everywoman who just wants to curl up in a ball.

She conveys, wonderfully, the sense of having to walk through the day when everything hurts. There’s no comforting her because no one knows the right thing to say, because there is no right thing to say. The only right thing would be to tell her she can have the only thing she wants, which is the only thing she can’t have.

Three months after Matt’s death, Leigh is still so fragile that she’s bunking at the home of her mother, Amy (Janet McTeer, below), alongside her younger sister, Jules (Kelly Marie Tran, below).

Jules has her own issues, having recently ventured back into the world from rehab. She and Leigh have a prickly relationship in which their affection and camaraderie are constantly undercut by the little resentments that neither can help referencing.

Their mother is from the world of self-realization and self-actualization. The first episode includes a flashback scene where Amy brought them all to the beach to sit cross-legged around a fire, write their regrets on a stone, and cast them into the ocean.

Okay.

Presumably, because Jules and Leigh are used to her, Amy may be more annoying to viewers than to her family. She’s not evil, just medium-high maintenance.

The other main character in Sorry For Your Loss is also family: Danny Greer (Jovan Adepo), Matt’s brother and best friend. Leigh was never crazy about Danny, and Matt’s death ratchets up her ambivalence.

Especially when Danny says things like his loss was more severe because Elizabeth can find another husband, but he can never find another brother.

Don’t laugh. Or rather, do laugh. Comments like that are the comedy part of Sorry For Your Loss and, believe it or not, they have the intended effect.

Leigh herself can’t try to be funny. She can throw clever, cutting remarks into conversation because that’s what she does. She can absorb and react to all the awkward, well-meaning things people say to her, some of which are amusing because they are so clueless.

Sometimes Sorry For Your Loss gets amusing just because Leigh takes out her frustration on whatever crosses her field of vision. She leaves a grief counseling session because the organizer didn’t bring doughnuts, which she declares is the main reason she came in the first place.

Through moments like that, Sorry For Your Loss very nicely illustrates how sometimes there is no solution to a problem. As viewers, we want to see Leigh, whom we like, feel better. We tell ourselves that someday she will because that’s how things work. But right now, she doesn’t, and there’s nothing she or anyone can do about it.

Since curling up in that ball isn’t a viable option, even in the short term, she gets up every day and goes through the whole spectrum of how to deal with it, and at the end of a lot of days, nothing feels like it helped.

That may be where the comedy part comes in. Because she has to wake up every day, and she has to do things, and she has to speak, perhaps the ray of hope is that she’s still got the person she was before she met Matt. That person, however wounded, carries on.

Put that way it sounds clunky and melodramatic. Framed as it is in Sorry For Your Loss, we want to keep seeing where it goes. It’s engaging and – don’t say this to Leigh – even a bit hopeful.