Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ On Hulu, Where Kathryn Hahn Is A Woman Who Becomes An Advice Columnist Despite Her Messy Life

Kathryn Hahn has proven repeatedly over her career that she’s equally capable of wacky comedy and emotional drama, often being portrayed in the same scene. She can go from one extreme to the other, or even combine pathos and silliness, and make it natural and believable. A new Hulu series, based on a Cheryl Strayed book about her own life, brings that ability into sharp focus.

TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear typing, then a voice reading a letter to an advice column called “Dear Sugar.” Then a car goes down a darkened street with Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” blasting.

The Gist: Clare Pierce (Kathryn Hahn) is getting a ride back from a retirement party at the retirement home where she works, and she’s completely drunk. She tries to get into her house, can’t find her key and gets in through an open window. But when her husband Danny Kinkade (Quentin Plair) and her daughter Rae (Tanzyn Crawford) find her, they wonder why she’s there.

Clare was so drunk that she completely forgot that Danny kicked her out a few days ago, because she gave over a big chunk of Rae’s college fund to her brother Luke without telling him first. It was just the latest in a pattern of behavior that has sent Danny and Clare into counselling. Clare Ubers back to where she works; instead of crashing with her friend Amy (Michaela Watkins), she’s been sleeping in an open bed in one of the residents’ rooms.

That night she writes a letter to an advice column called Dear Sugar, which she’s been reading a lot over the past few months; something the columnist wrote about losing her sister resonated with her. Clare lost her mother to cancer when she was 22, and in flashbacks, we see young Clare (Sarah Pidgeon), young Luke (Owen Painter) and their mother Frankie (Merritt Wever) celebrating what turns out to be their last Christmas together. Frankie doesn’t have a lot of money, but gives Clare a long puffy coat for her move to New York. It’s tan, a color she doesn’t like, and a bit too bulky. She wants to take it back, and Frankie doesn’t want to tell her it was a final sale item.

The next day at work, Clare is approached by Sam Carter (Zak Orth), an old friend and the editor of the newspaper with the Dear Sugar column. He reveals to her that he saw her letter to Dear Sugar, he’s always admired her writing, and that he needs someone to take over the column from the current writer, which is himself. She’s dumbfounded, especially when he says he made up the dead sister she identified with so closely. She thinks she can’t do the column because her life is a shitshow. “Everyone’s lives are a fucking shitshow!” he tells her. He hands her some letters to pick from.

She goes to therapy with Danny, and the therapist suggests that women “over 50” (she’s only 49) are seen as invisible. When Clare gets annoyed after seeing Danny talking to the therapist after the appointment is over, she decides to sleep with her hot Uber Pool driver; but he can’t get it in somehow, and he also has a waterbed. So, feeling ridiculous, she leaves, and imagines herself again right after her mom died, high on heroin, imagining that she couldn’t accept “tiny beautiful things” at that point in her life, when age and wisdom tells her that she should have.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Given the fact that Tiny Beautiful Things is based on a book by Cheryl Strayed and the fact that Reeese Witherspoon is among the series’ executive producers, it’s not hard to link this show up with the film Wild. But the influence of Liz Tigelaar, the showrunner, makes us think of Tigelaar’s series Life Unexpected, as well.

Our Take: There are times that Tiny Beautiful Things tips into heavy-handed territory, like when Clare’s advice-columnist voice over says, “When a gift is given, say thank you,” over and over at the end of the first episode. On the surface, she’s talking about the puffy coat that ended up being the last thing her mom ever gave her. But it also meant that she should accept the gift of getting the chance to do the advice column.

Eye-rolling moments like that are tolerable when the rest of the show is as good as the first two episodes are. A lot of it has to do with Hahn and her now well-known capacity to carry comedy, pathos and emotion simultaneously, and she makes Clare into a very believable middle-aged trainwreck. While we’re not quite sure what has transpired in her more recent life to get her to the point where she’s been tossed out of her house, on the outs with both her husband and teenage daughter, the flashbacks give us more than enough information to tell us about what Clare has been fighting against over the last 27 years.

The flashbacks add a lot to the story, and not just because Wever is her usual funny and warm self as Frankie. Clare has been fighting being poor, fighting being in a family that’s struggled emotionally (her estranged father was never around after he left Frankie), fighting having to raise her younger brother after Frankie’s death, fighting addiction and fighting the fact that she didn’t follow through on her writing talents. Those demons tend to pop back up throughout your life, just when you think you’ve learned how to keep them at bay.

Will we find out more about what Clare has been guilty of in her more recent years? Perhaps, especially through the answers to the letters she fields as Sugar. But the flashes back and forward, and the melding of the two that we see going in Clare’s head, will definitely push the narrative forward.

What we’d like to see is a bit more character development from the people in Clare’s life now. We know a touch about Danny, who’s younger than Clare, and Rae, and the second episode gives us some more information about how Rae expresses her teenage rebellion in light of Clare’s fuck-ups. We’d also like to see some origins of her friendship with Amy, only because we want to see more of Watkins in any role she inhabits.

But even if we just focused on Hahn as middle-aged Clare stumble through things while she tries to give anonymous letter writers advice, we’d sign on for that.

Sex and Skin: There’s a lot of clothed sex, especially in flashbacks. Let’s say that Clare was as addicted to sex as she was other things in her life.

Parting Shot: After seeing Clare embracing her old coat in a box, left at her door by Luke, Rae helps bring the box inside. “Thank you,” Clare says as Rae closes the door, adhering to her mantra of “When a gift is given, say thank you.”

Sleeper Star: Like we said, Michaela Watkins is hilarious in pretty much any role she does, and we love her snide remarks to Clare as she tends bar.

Most Pilot-y Line: When she realizes she’s on a waterbed, Clare laugh-cries and says, “Is this 1979? Am I trapped in a fucking Steely Dan song?” The Uber driver eventually replies, “I like Steely Dan.” What are the chances that dude knows who Steely Dan even is?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kathryn Hahn makes Tiny Beautiful Things a compelling watch, mainly because she’s so good at playing someone barely holding things together. But the rest of the series, especially the flashback sequences, give us a pretty full picture of why her character continues to spiral.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.