Olive Kitteridge (2014)

Built from Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of linked stories about a Maine schoolteacher, and told in four parts that first aired over two nights. Frances McDormand plays Olive as blunt, funny and often unkind, and won an Emmy for it; Richard Jenkins as her patient husband is just as good. The story spans decades of one marriage and one small town, so it suits readers who love quiet literary fiction more than plot. It is melancholy and does not soften Olive to make her likable, which is exactly why skeptics tend to trust it.