Elizabeth Olsen plays a young widow in this thoughtful and loving series about navigating grief.

VOX – In Watch This, Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff tells you what she’s watching on TV — and why you should watch it, too. Read the archives here. This week: Sorry for Your Loss, which airs on Facebook Watch.
Every article about the TV show Sorry for Your Loss must cover the following bullet points, as though they are recorded in the Constitution:
- It’s a brilliantly devastating little drama, full of light and love
- Its amazing cast is anchored by the sweet and soulful Elizabeth Olsen
- It airs on Facebook Watch, so good luck finding it [insert boilerplate about how Facebook is destroying the planet]
All of the above, so far as it goes, is true. Sorry for Your Loss is a terrific show — one of TV’s best — but the fact that it’s sequestered within a section of Facebook that seems almost intentionally difficult to find means that extremely few people have seen it. I watched the entire second season via screener and I could not possibly imagine how anyone would organically stumble upon the show on Facebook, short of just Googling it.
And that’s why I’m writing about Sorry for Your Loss and linking to it here — I really want people to watch it. What the show does is in short supply on TV right now, and if it doesn’t get a third season (season two just ended on Tuesday, November 19), I might have to finally get mad at Mark Zuckerberg.
So what does it do that’s so unique and interesting? I’m glad you asked.
Sorry for Your Loss somehow turns the debilitating process of grief into a TV show
When I first learned the premise of Sorry for Your Loss — a young widow named Leigh (Olsen) tries to live in the wake of her husband’s death — I had the same thought that many others probably did: How in the world is that enough for a TV show? A movie, sure. A novel, absolutely. A stage play, I’m writing it right now! But a TV show? One that will air week after week after week? It can’t possibly work.
I was wrong. What makes Sorry for Your Loss so good is that it understands grief isn’t a neat arc with a beginning and an end. It’s a process of atomization. An incident happens and your whole body feels like it’s engulfed in the flames of a nuclear blast. But with every passing day, it dissipates a little more and a little more. You’re able to do more, to get out of bed, to resume your life. But you always live with the residue of what happened. Your body is now radioactive, no matter how much the most immediately deadly elements dull with time. You learn how to live with grief; you don’t learn how to defeat it.