Drama is a very hard genre to write for, I think. You want things to have a certain amount of gravitas so that they elicit an emotional response from the audience, but when everything is just doom and gloom all the time, you risk alienating them instead. Unfortunately I think Returning the Star suffers from this: we open on a father losing his son, and things only get worse from there up until his attempted suicide. I'm not going to say that Matthew's death isn't a tragic thing and Daniel is overreacting, but it's hard to sympathize when we know so little about Daniel, about Matthew, even about the situation that caused his death in the first place. It all feels stock--especially the classic line "We did everything we could" line. There's nothing that we haven't seen a million times before in other pieces of media that let us form a unique connection with Daniel and his situation. For what it's worth, I do like Daniel cutting into Malcolm at the funeral, and I'd like to see more interactions like that--Daniel pushing away the only people who care for him in his grief and clearly regretting it--in the future. 

Of course, I understand that this story is a work in progress, and now that Alex is in the picture I'm hopeful that things will start to lighten up and we'll see a more sympathetic view of Daniel as we move forward. I am a sucker for stories about people being dragged along kicking and screaming past their worst moment by people who care about them.