A Mr. Rostan at the Movies Special: Olive Kitteridge
Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.
During the Emmys this year, a significant part of the conversation focused on both the wins of Jon Hamm and Viola Davis and the record-breaking haul for Game of Thrones. These were reasonable expectations. What surprised me and, I think, many others, were the eight awards given to another HBO program, the miniseries Olive Kitteridge. This was a show that received a great deal of advertising; but, as with CBS’s unrelenting line-up of procedurals, I didn’t know anyone who actually had watched it. Made curious by the Emmys, I fired up HBO GO and spent this past weekend viewing all four hours, and by the final shot I was a broken, sobbing heap who needed to call his parents to regain emotional equilibrium.
Olive Kitteridge joins John Adams, The Wire, and Deadwood as one of HBO’s greatest gifts to us.