‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ EPs Liz Tigelaar and Cheryl Strayed Reveal Which “Dear Sugar” Columns They Wished Were in the Show

HuluHulu’s new series Tiny Beautiful Things imagines what writer and former “Dear Sugar” columnist Cheryl Strayed‘s life might have looked like if she had not ever embarked on the life-changing and inspiring journey detailed in her best-seller Wild. If Cheryl had not responded to her beloved mother’s death by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she might have become “Clare,” a writer whose personal and professional life are cratering around her because she has not yet learned how to let go of her grief and trauma.

Kathryn Hahn plays the forty-something Clare, who has found herself flailing in a rubble of a collapsing marriage. However she is offered something of a life line. An older writer pal offers Clare the opportunity to take over an advice column at a hip literary magazine. Clare does so reluctantly and in the process learns how to make peace with the younger version of herself, played by Sarah Pidgeon. Together, Hahn and Pidgeon not only make up the whole of Clare, but they even play off of each other in scenes where Clare flits between the emotional states of her younger and older selves. Through these scene swaps and flashbacks, we see how the death of Clare’s mother pushed the young aspiring writer off track and into a series of bad decisions, from drug abuse to poor relationship choices.

Decider caught up with Liz Tigelaar, the showrunner and executive producer of Tiny Beautiful Things, and fellow EP Cheryl Strayed after the Hulu show’s panel at the Television Critics Association’s 2023 Winter Press Tour. We found out which columns from Strayed’s eponymous collection of “Dear Sugar” installments didn’t make it into the show, what it’s like for Strayed to see this “Sliding Doors” version of her life onscreen, and why Tigelaar — who also produced Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere — loves three-word show titles that evoke the diminutive.

DECIDER: My first question is a follow up from the Tiny Beautiful Things TCA panel. You guys mentioned that initially half the columns that Liz planned to put in the series were sort of swapped in with other ones. What were some of the columns that you cut and could they come up in a potential Season 2? 

LIZ TIGELAAR: I don’t know if I can even remember the cut columns, now. I mean, I will say one thing: I would have made the pilot “Baby Bird.” That was the column when I read the book that gripped me by the collar and it just felt so powerful to me. So that was one that didn’t necessarily find its place in the season, but I would have started with. But of course our partners are Hello Sunshine. I don’t know if “Baby Bird”….we were saying that that was more like “Hello Darkness.” You gotta know your audience. 

CHERYL STRAYED: Yeah, I’m trying to think, too. It was definitely “The Baby Bird,” and I think maybe “The Obliterated Place.” And you know it wasn’t anything specifically about that column where we were like, “We can’t put that in,” but, like I said in the panel, what we were trying to do was in some ways echo or evoke what the characters were experiencing that was connected to the column. And sometimes we wanted to go in different directions. And so Liz’s list of columns she’d like to have in, they were never set in stone. It was just a place to begin from, really.

You also mentioned during the panel how Clare diverges from you Cheryl, and how she’s sort of the version that didn’t go on the hiking trip in Wild, didn’t experience some of the same writerly experiences. But I’m curious, Cheryl, I know you and your husband produced this. What is it like seeing a fictionalized version of what your lives could have been? What was it like watching this kind of weird, fun house mirror version of your marriage? 

LT: I mean you gotta be relieved right?

CS: That’s funny. It’s funny that you should ask that because there are so many times that as I’ve been watching the show I think, “I’m so glad that this character is not me and that I am not this character.” It was really fun to say, “Okay, here’s this woman who has had so many of those experiences like mine: losing her mother, having a young marriage that ended in divorce.” Some of those things in her 20s that I actually did live through, and it’s sort of like the road not traveled right? That I went one way and our Clare went another. Thank goodness. 

DECIDER: It’s your own “ghost ship” that you’re playing on.

LT: Yeah, totally.

CS: Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t think about that. It is my own ghost ship for sure

Liz, your last show for Hulu, I believe, was Little Fires Everywhere which sounds very similar to Tiny Beautiful Things in terms of the small noun —

LT: (Laughs) Yes I only do things in threes now.

Well I’m curious did that ever come up how it’s kind of similar in title and they’re both from the same producing team? Did you ever think of calling it Dear Sugar? Why did you feel it had to be called Tiny Beautiful Things?

LT: You know it’s funny. Sometimes I’m like, “Little Fire, Little Beautiful Things, Little…” You know, that definitely comes up. But Tiny Beautiful Thing is just — I find it to be so iconic and I think that passage in the book is one of my favorite passages. This idea of Cheryl, at the time, believing that she didn’t have a right to such tiny beautiful things and it just had to be. I mean I never thought of it another way. I didn’t get deterred by the three words.

CS: Yeah, I think that it is the title column of the book, obviously. And the moment in that column, what I say is at your lowest moment, at the moment you think you have no value or worth to yourself or anyone else, you’re wrong. You’re wrong about that belief. That belief is a bad story you’ve told yourself. You do have the right to all the tiny beautiful things in this life and in this world. I would have been happy no matter what they decided to call the show. I feel honored that this has been adapted for television. But there is something I think in the title that tells its own story that very much tells us what the show is about and it is about believing that we all have value.

Obviously Wild was turned into a film starring Reese Witherspoon. This is [Cheryl’s] second time being adapted. What was it about Kathryn Hahn and also Sarah Pidgeon that made you feel like together they would be the perfect Clare?

LT: I mean, we were both humongous fans of Kathryn and I think that Kathryn has an ability to— She doesn’t show a TV portrayal of what it means to be human; she shows a human version of what it means to be human. She just has an ability to put her guts on the outside and just bring it. We’ve talked about it a lot. Just her range and her depth and the fact that she’s not one thing, she can do all the things. She can be making you laugh, she can be making you cry, she can be subtle, she can be broad, she can do everything. But I think what united the two of them for this role is that it took an incredible amount of bravery to share a character, to play a character together, and to play this character. And both Kathryn and Sarah, we felt could just mine the depth of this woman. You could feel how they were penetrated by these losses, by this grief, and that they both carried this amazing reverence for their mom. 

Following up on that, I was really struck how, you know we’ve seen a lot of shows lately where you have an older actress playing one version of a character and a younger actress playing the teen years. But in this show they can be in the same scene, and you’ll have the actresses switch out from shot to shot. I’m curious where that idea came from and what were the logistics like? How did you decide when to swap people in? Can you tell me more about that process and how you wanted to merge those two actresses in one role?

Tigelaar: Yeah, I’m so glad you asked that question because this is like one of my favorite things about the show. I loved this idea and we talked about it a lot. Like all the versions that live inside of you. That you don’t outgrow versions of yourself. You just layer on top, almost like Russian dolls, versions of yourself. So at any moment any of those versions could come out. I’m a 47-year-old woman, I could be fighting with my wife and suddenly I’m acting like my 13-year-old self, or with my son and we’re two seven-year-olds fighting. (Laughs) Not that I fight with everybody all the time. That’s just an example.

Anyway, all to say that I just loved the idea of seeing, and actually, not to be too ramble-y about it, but it actually came out of thinking about how to do “Baby Bird” as a story because I was like how do we tell this story knowing that it involves younger actors? So I remember starting to think about it like what if we look at it as like all the selves that are inhabited inside of us and how can we merge past and present the way that they are merged inside of you? So It started to kind of structurally move toward this story of Clare can feel her 22-year-old self in her most vulnerable moments. She can be with the Uber driver and suddenly she’s doing the destructive things that she did at 22. Conversely, she’s also healing something in herself so her present self can start to come back into memory and have a relationship to those memories in a new way. So whether it’s seeing her mom on Lady or whether it’s telling her younger self, “Don’t stop, don’t give up, keep going,” she starts to have a relationship to her own past. And she starts to heal through that. So that is one of my favorite things about the show.

Tiny Beautiful Things is now streaming on Hulu.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.