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Based on the novel by Cheryl Strayed, Hulu original miniseries Tiny Beautiful Things is a heartfelt handful of letters to all who grieve relationships and loved ones. Kathryn Hahn gives a grade-A performance as the conflicted series protagonist, Clare (whose younger self is portrayed by Sarah Pidgeon), who lost her mother, Frankie (Merritt Wever), to lung cancer during her last year of college. As natural as loss is as a part of life, Tiny Beautiful Things uniquely hits on the objectively strange concept of loss and, consequently, grief.
What Is ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ About?
49-year-old writer Clare is dealing with everything imaginable on top of grieving her mother’s death as a young adult. Her husband, Danny (Quentin Plair), has kicked her out of their home after she lent their daughter Rae’s (Tanzyn Crawford) college fund to her younger brother, Lucas (portrayed by Owen Painter and, later, Nick Stahl). All of her most important relationships are strained and her writing career is suffering, but she’s just been given an opportunity to use her voice to help others with their relationships as a writer for an advice column under the pseudonym “Sugar.” Already feeling like a failure, she plays this whole internet therapist thing by ear. But with every letter she responds to, writing to others as the anonymous “Sugar” ends up serving as a kind of therapy for herself. The series sees Clare doing her best to cope with her present struggles while they cause her to relive grief-stricken memories on a daily basis.
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Kathryn Hahn gives a resonant performance as the grieving Clare (aka Sugar) in Tiny Beautiful Things. Hahn is well known for her versatility in representing the ungraceful but equally strong side of women. The character of Clare involved a great deal of internal conflict that fluidly seeped through Hahn’s external acting. Her micro-reactions to others’ unfair assumptions of her behavior and to people’s general stupidity, like her couples’ therapist clearly showing a bias toward her husband, are hilarious and worth the watch. But her more poignant moments, such as when she camps out in front of her daughter’s bedroom door simply waiting until she’s ready to talk, increase sympathy for the character in her seemingly perpetual streak of defeat. Kathryn Hahn’s performance as the fundamentally disheveled author, daughter, mother, wife, and sister is every bit funny as it is tragic.
Kathryn Hahn’s Clare knows the story she wants to tell, regardless of what people want to hear. Early in her writing career, she submitted an essay to an editorial publisher that was equal parts grief and erotica, but she was told that her work wouldn’t be published unless she made edits to “lose the sad.” Clare’s original concept of connecting sex and sadness is essentially what makes up the heart of miniseries. Her relationship with her mother, as well as with her father, is put in constant conversation with her drive for physical pleasure as a young woman.
In my recent (and unintentional) personal strain of grief-themed media, Tiny Beautiful Things particularly struck a chord with the concept of grief by pointing out the absurdity of the fact that things disappear. In the episode titled “The Nose,” Clare contemplates the importance of a short story of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, in which a man wakes up one day to find that his nose has disappeared. While it was merely the topic of class discussion, Clare debated that the story was pointless, devoid of subtext, and not worth her time as the subject for the paper that would grant her graduation from college. As an adult, Clare revisits the theory via her position as Sugar, and concludes that the short story indeed had no subtext at all, and that it was literally an absurd writing about exactly what it was about: a man loses something as close to him as the nose on his face, and immediately has to navigate his life without it. She boils the moral of the story down to “the absurd and arbitrary nature of disappearance.”
The message that Tiny Beautiful Things presents on grief is resonant and real. No matter how far along a person is in their life, losing someone you love is just not an easy task. There is no playbook for getting around it, and it seems that no amount of preparation can actually prepare you for being in it. As much as we can accept that death is a part of life, walking with it happens to be an absolutely absurd and never-ending process.
Tiny Beautiful Things is available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.
- Release Date
- April 7, 2023
- Creator
- Liz Tigelaar
- Main Genre
- Drama
- Seasons
- 1
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