This family saga has all the gritty potential to be self-serious, utterly miserable, and well-accoladed. Told in quotidian snapshots, the show captures 25 years in the life of McDormand’s Olive, a curmudgeonly, schlubby seventh-grade math teacher who, in the first few minutes of the series, puts a gun to her head. What drove her to such a desperate point? As the series unfolds, the answers unravel: Olive is haunted by her father’s suicide, her son Christopher (Gallagher Jr.) resents her, her husband Henry (Jenkins) has eyes for his new pharmacist’s assistant Denise (Kazan), and her own extramarital crush died in a mysterious crash that, as a fellow depressive speculates midway through, might have been intentional.

Does the miserable premise live up to its premium-content promise ? In part, yes: Olive Kitteridge delivers on the requisite mythically old-fashioned vision of working-class America, embodied by its gray coastal town—a chain-free stretch of sidewalk shadowed only by a lone Citizens Bank—that is aggressively banal. Yet the mopey verisimilitude is also something of a joke: No town could actually be so bleak. Around every corner, it seems, characters are pondering suicidal thoughts, attempting to commit suicide, or talking about it. Intentionally or not, Olive Kitteridge parodies the gritty prestige-content awards complex that brought it about.

In major contrast to HBO’s relentlessly nihilistic summer series The Leftovers, the obsession with death in Olive Kitteridge is fairly comedic. Unintentionally, Olive keeps stopping people from killing themselves, merely by being her usual unpleasant self. When a depressive complains her son doesn’t love her: “Don’t oblige him,” she says. When her former student says he wants to kill himself in the woods to make it cleaner: “It’s never clean,” she scolds, like he’s back in seventh grade. Olive is like It’s A Wonderful Life’s Clarence Odbody, except she’s telling them all It’s A Miserable Life, and just to get over themselves.

In playing this unlikely guardian angel, McDormand is magnificent. Olive is as unforgiving as the biting winds whipping through her New England hometown. She’s allergic to sympathy by nature, and though her own depression is apparent, she chalks it up to simple "bad wiring." Played with wonderful wind-swept, make-up-free frankness by McDormand, Olive calls everyone out, often at the most inappropriate moments, like at the dinner table. In every scene she creates an emotional climate of extreme austerity, as life-giving and unpleasant as the stew she slops on the plates of family and guests at dinner—it may not be delicious, Olive warns, but it will fill you up.

In the process Olive Kitteridge calls Hollywood out for the way it sentimentalizes real problems for the sake of gravity. There are some of the same awards-season issues here—a depressed character dropped in halfway through feels more cookie-cutter clinical than the rest, and the point-of-view hallucination sequences have a slightly vaudevillian freak show component. But it’s admirable in the way it makes mental illness more than just a secondary character trawling the bottom of human experience, or an obstacle to be overcome, or an effective weapon in the fight against terror. In Olive Kitteridge depression is a human condition. It can make life miserable, yes, but also fulfilling and funny.