Olive Kitteridge Collects All Your Favourites, Drops Them Off In Maine

There are lots of reasons to devour Olive Kitteridge, HBO's latest miniseries. It's based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 novel by Elizabeth Strout. It's certain to be nominated for everything at the Emmys next year. It will leave you yearning both for a summer vacation in Maine and for the vintage wallpaper that everyone apparently decorates with.

But the very best reason to watch Olive Kitteridge is that its cast boasts more Dealmakers per square inch than...you know, I've got to go all the way back to Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven. Any one of the below would be enough to recommend it; that we get all of them feels like Christmas coming early.

Frances McDormand: The Oscar-winning actress -- who basically hasn't done TV since 1987's Leg Work -- plays the titular Olive, and given that a lot of plot turns rest on her extreme crustiness (...okay: bitchiness), McDormand is a perfect fit. McDormand's Olive is uncompromising, judgmental, and generally joyless; the closest she gets to cheerfulness is in her description of the depression that runs in her family and her belief that the condition is a mark of intelligence. Over the course of four hours with her, we come to learn what her prickly kind of love looks like, but she's not easy, and McDormand plays her without any vanity and basically zero softness, and it's magnificent.

Richard Jenkins: Serious Q: has there ever been a Richard Jenkins performance that wasn't perfect? The lonely amateur drummer in The Visitor; the gay FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster; even the furious dad to an idiot man-child in Step Brothers -- all are invested with Jenkins's decency and pathos, and his Henry Kitteridge is another excellent entry on his CV. As a small-town pharmacist, Henry derives a lot of self-worth from his ability to help not just his customers but everyone who crosses his path, which is part of why his wife, Olive, spends so much of their life together refusing to appreciate him or even take him seriously.

Jesse Plemons: Jerry, Henry's pharmacy delivery boy, is classic post-Breaking Bad Plemons: a seeming simpleton at first, hardening into something more sinister, but so gradually you don't notice until it's too late and lives have been permanently ruined.

Brady Corbet: Who do you get to play a blond, All-American ex-high school football star unaccountably married to a mousy drip if Billy Magnussen's unavailable? Good old Brady Corbet, who (spoiler alert) manages not to murder anyone this time.

Ann Dowd: If Dealmaker emerita Dowd took a tiny role as one of Olive's oldest friends just to show off yet another of her carefully tuned northeastern American accents, it was worth it.

Donna Mitchell: Better known to some as The Version Of Mary Beth Peil Who Could Star In An Ad For Women's Hormone Replacement Therapy, Donna Mitchell has been on my bad-ass list since she played sweater-fondler Gene's inexplicably elegant wife in Wet Hot American Summer, and has stayed there through serious roles (as in Away From Her) and more comedy (as wife to fellow Dealmaker Victor Garber in 30 Rock's "Respawn" -- VERY wool). As Louise, one of the town's fanciest ladies, Mitchell gets a killer scene in the second night of the miniseries...but she would have made it onto this list even if all she'd had to do is stand in a doorway wearing this coat.