Olive Kitteridge (Lisa Cholodenko, 2014), quality television and difficult women: female discontent in the age of binge-viewing

Abstract

ABSTRACTLisa Cholodenko’s 2014 series Olive Kitteridge remains something of an outlier in the recent wave of female-led quality TV drama. Its outlier status is not only because of its unlikely protagonist – a difficult and at times unlikeable older woman, nor is it simply a result of the confined temporal throw of its four episode structure. One of the key things that sets Olive Kitteridge apart from both other female-led series with “difficult women” protagonists and from other recent quality TV dramas is that its narrative concern with disappointment and other forms of negative affect is tied to the ways the series occupies and articulates television (viewing) time. This essay argues that Olive Kitteridge constructs a sense of domestic confinement and dissatisfaction that spills from narrative into form and address. Olive Kitteridge does not simply offer a different form of difficult and disappointed woman in its central protagonist to that more commonly found in the recent wave of female-led quality television. It also unsettles the consumption of female disappointment in and as quality television drama.