“Tiny Beautiful Things” Review: Kathryn Hahn Carries This Uneven Show

This patchwork of anecdotes makes for a unique read. Through her letters, Sugar’s persona comes together gradually, in serendipitous glimpses that add depth to what is frequently a formulaic genre of writing. But the structure of an advice column poses fundamental challenges for a TV adaptation: Sugar is the only recurring character, and her recollections of her life are mostly plotless, more like vignettes than stories. 

Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things approaches this problem by fleshing out its main character’s story in two parallel timelines. There’s present-day, middle-aged Clare Pierce (Kathryn Hahn), a fictionalized version of Strayed who never achieved writing success. Clare reluctantly takes over the Dear Sugar column while coping with her crumbling marriage to husband Danny Kinkade (Quentin Plair) and her strained relationship with teenage daughter Frankie Rae (Tanzyn Crawford). Then there’s Clare’s younger self (Sarah Pidgeon), whose story spans several years. The younger Clare grows up in a poor, rural area with her younger brother, Lucas (Owen Painter), and single mother, Frankie (Merritt Wever). She dreams of becoming a writer, but her career goals get interrupted several times over — most notably, by her mother’s death from cancer when Clare is just a senior in college, a catastrophic loss she’s still coping with years later. 

Most of the show’s eight episodes are loosely structured around a Dear Sugar letter. In one episode, Clare addresses a letter writer who can’t decide whether or not to have children. In the present, she and Danny deal with Frankie Rae’s teenage rebellion; in the past, Clare and Danny meet, fall in love, break up, and then find out they’re going to have a baby. Young Clare encourages Danny to pursue his music career instead of fatherhood, reassuring him that she wants to “go to Iceland and climb a glacier” instead of becoming a mother. But they choose to get back together and raise Frankie Rae anyway. At the end of the episode, the elder Clare tells her letter writer that there is no way to know what would have happened if she didn’t have kids. “We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful,” she writes. “And not ours.”