My problem with Sorry Your Loss (Spoilers ahead)

I did my first re-watch of this show called, Sorry for Your Loss, and I really wanted to talk about it. So what is Sorry for Your Loss?

Synopsis:

Sorry for Your Loss tells the story of Leigh Shaw, a young widow struggling to put her life back together after her husband’s unexpected death. The show is simultaneously devastating and uplifting with grounded, flawed characters who are desperate to find humor anywhere they can.

It’s a Facebook original show and it only lasted two seasons (such a shame. I wished it went on for longer). It stars Elizabeth Olsen and that’s all I needed at the time. I started to fall in love with Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was itching to try out another one of her works. Then I came across the trailer for Sorry for Your Loss.

A simple concept for a moving show and it was a pretty short show. I watched it in a couple of days. I was hooked. I loved Elizabeth Olsen’s acting, I loved the filming, the characters, everything. The humor melds together with the tragic story within the show. The amalgamation of memories of Matt with Leigh’s attempt at moving on showcases the real grueling reality of grief.

Elizabeth Olsen’s performance captures Leigh’s grief so beautifully. Throughout the show, you live and breathe Leigh’s tragedy so you feel for her. However, she can be unlikeable at times, such as using the loss of Matt to win arguments with her sister, Jules. Grief can bring out the worst in people and Sorry for Your Loss portrays that amazingly. You follow her struggle to go on in life without her person, such as getting up in the morning, going to work, writing a blog post for her job, and hanging out with family. Leigh’s family dynamic reminds me of the show, Grace and Frankie with the hippie mom and quirky moments between them. I was gripped from beginning to end. It feels like an indie show, a very small show and it has so much heart in it. I absolutely loved it. Now, when I first watched this show, I did love it. However, I had one gripe with it when I watched it the first time. That was I didn’t like season 2, especially what happened with the relationship between Leigh and Matt’s brother, Danny.

In season one, we follow these two through their grief, Leigh with her husband’s death, and Danny with his brother’s death. These characters hated each other at the beginning of the show. So Matt’s death brought them together. In season one, it was such a beautiful progression, and the season ends with the twist that Danny has fallen for Leigh. A great way to end the season and a great human twist. I wondered how they would continue on with it in season 2.

When I started season 2, I felt it got slower. That it wasn’t as interesting and then episode 7 happens. Danny and Leigh got together and it went downhill for me. The first time I went through the show, I felt that was a cop-out. The writers just did it for shock value. No one would ever get with their dead husband’s brother nine months after their death. It felt unbelievable and went against the characters I grew to love. And then the season ends on a cliffhanger with it being the last season. So I left it with a bad taste in my mouth. After my first watch, I loved the show but didn’t like season 2.

However, I re-watched the show recently, and I have a new appreciation for season 2. The whole concept behind the show is how every person deals with grief differently. With Leigh’s journey, we follow her stages of grief, but the show also delves into everyone’s different forms of grief, such as Leigh’s mother feeling she lost a son and ends up disappearing to Alaska for a couple of episodes. Or with Leigh’s sister feeling her alcoholism contributed to Matt’s death since she couldn’t be there for him as much as she would have liked to. And in the second season, they explored that more vividly through the relationship between Leigh and Danny. Leigh and Danny have very different experiences of grief in season 2. We start to see Danny and Matt’s relationship through flashbacks and it wasn’t always good.

Danny didn’t view Matt through rose-colored glasses like Leigh. In season one, we see Leigh relieving this beautiful life she had with Matt and having to accept he was gone. She accepted that Matt wasn’t doing well and that he possibly didn’t die by accident. Then you have Danny who tries to make Leigh see that his brother wasn’t a hero in a cape as she likes to remember him. He tells her of times he wasn’t a good brother to him and a good husband to her, which leads to their ultimate breakdown in season 2. But both characters return to a similar place after they clashed. At the end of the season, Danny finds himself in a therapist’s office and says that if he was a different person, maybe Matt would still be alive. For Leigh, she arrives at the consensus that she is a terrible person and that Matt took the best parts of her with him when he died. That she hates herself by the end of the show. Though both characters feel differently about Matt and deal with their grief so differently, they arrive back at the same place. Alone and feel responsible for the loss. The appearance of Matt’s apparition to Leigh at the end reinforces that point. Matt won’t leave Leigh when for the first time, she wants him to.

To me, it was an interesting dichotomy of grief, as neither characters do good things but through their grief, it’s a human experience that is so raw and harrowing. This show reveals so many beautiful and harrowing moments of grief and after my re-watch, I have a newfound appreciation of season two. It was not made for shock value or just to create drama out of nowhere. It all led to more realizations for these characters to get through their grief and it’s hard. This is not an easy fix and Sorry For Your Loss showcases that.

Please if you haven’t already, give this show a watch. I promise you won’t regret it. I hope you enjoyed my little review or thoughts on the show and I shall see ye in the next post.