Tiny Beautiful Things review: Kathryn Hahn cannot save series that loses its steam even before it approaches to take off

For those who have read and cherished the words of Cheryl Strayed, including me, the new eight-part series Tiny Beautiful Things based on the collection of advice letters from her column ‘Dear Sugar’, would genuinely pick interest and attention. Throw in Kathryn Hahn, and you’d expect another nothing less than a poignant show. But trust the formula to not work only when it had almost everything going for it. Alas, Tiny Beautiful Things never rises above its formulaic, manipulative parts to dig into its own restless understanding of agony and healing. (Also read: Beef review: Steven Yeun, Ali Wong wreck havoc in one of the year’s best shows)

Adapted by Liz Tigelaar (who also developed another Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere), Tiny Beautiful Things gets the tone all wrong from the very first episode. We first meet Clare Pierce (Kathryn Hahn), when she’s so wiped out that she has entirely forgotten that she has been thrown out the house by her husband Danny (Quentin Plair). Her daughter Rae (Tanzyn Crawford) doesn’t feign much surprise because she’s aware what her mother can forget. After a much needed reality check, Clare reports back to the retirement home she works at, while trying to keep writing to an advice column named ‘Dear Sugar’, which she has been reading for some months.

In parallel, we are introduced to a younger Clare (Sarah Pidgeon) and her mother Frankie (played by the always dependable Merritt Wever, whom you might remember ‘serving’ in Marriage Story), in flashbacks: as Clare enrolls into college, gets pregnant while Frankie is diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s a predictable route from the get-go, which would have still become poignant if the creators knew how to position the decades-long context into the present crises of Clare. Instead what little arc is built on the road to living with loss and fear is cut short with an extremely undercooked screenplay and edit work. The episodes struggle to underline the ways in which Clare traces back to her past to get her present column in place.

Yet, even then, Tiny Beautiful Things doesn’t adequately focus on her early years, leaving only snippets which feel increasingly manipulative and melodramatic. We know Frankie is dying, and Clare’s having trouble with connecting to anyone outside her family. But none of her motivations become clear. Consider the scene that appears in one of the later episodes when a younger Clare tells Frankie, “Jess (Clare’s current boyfriend who will eventually become her first husband) isn’t dad and I’m not you.” This is in response to her mother when she wants her to take time and consider everything before taking a big decision. “There’s a whole world out there of art, culture and rooms full of books and I want that,” Clare states, but not a word of this statement feels true, as in the next scene, we are again cut back to the present disorganized mess. The point isn’t that this is about a self-destructive, unlikable character who is trying to heal. The point is that it has nothing to say about the process at all.

Kathryn Hahn tries her best to redeem her figure of monumentally messed up woman on the verge of a breakdown, but she can only do enough in a series that loses its steam even before it approaches to take off. One can’t help but think of the stirring 2014 adaptation of Strayed’s Wild, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, that starred Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern as versions of Strayed and her mother. Witherspoon and Dern serve as executive producers here, yet none of the gravitas and nuance that followed Wild’s dramatization of Strayed’s Pacific Crest Trail, is present in Tiny Beautiful Things, which reduces the exuberance and spirit of that journey into one consolidated scene in one of the episodes. It almost feels like an afterthought, realised somewhere in-between. Tiny Beautiful Things has a lot of its own issues to even try to work around Clare’s. What it potentially needs is its own advice column.