Tiny Beautiful Things

While certain elements hit incredibly close to home, there is plenty to smile about amid the tears. Hahn has long offered performances to savor, and her turn as Clare is as insightful as the source material.

This series feels like a gift. ... Much like Strayed’s gorgeous source material, Hulu's Tiny Beautiful Things uses specificity to offer commentary on universal experiences and has the unique ability to strip the most complex topics down into their simplest, most resonant parts.

The show ultimately packs a much bigger emotional wallop than might otherwise be suggested by either its its seemingly straightforward premise or slim 30-minute episode run times. ... Hahn’s poignant delivery makes the most of Clare’s full-hearted prose, much of it excerpted from Strayed’s actual Dear Sugar columns. The words hold power even before we’ve had a chance to warm to Clare herself, or to click to the show’s combination of gimlet-eyed clarity and unabashed sentiment.

“Tiny Beautiful Things” lives up to its name, offering small moments of the sublime, made more poignant by the brokenness of its characters. Hahn delivers. ... Crawford also gives a strong, effortless performance.

Kathryn Hahn can do no wrong, and as Clare, she once again displays a breadth of tenderness, wit, and humanity. ... Although Tiny Beautiful Things does not follow the structure of the book at all, it is an honest adaptation of its spirit, making this a meaningful treat for fans of the book and newcomers alike.

It’s a confident blend of the original source material and a new fictionalized origin story of “Sugar” as an advice writer, all told over eight 30-minute dramas.

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.

All of it’s handled well and Hahn is terrific, resulting in “Things” being one of Reese Witherspoon’s best Hello Sunshine productions yet.

“Dear Sugar’s” unique advice takes a turn toward conventional life lessons near the end, and the sentimentality is a letdown. But thanks to Hahn and Pidgeon, and a whole load of great writing, “Tiny Beautiful Things” is for the most part a hard, faceted jewel of a TV show.

The events of “Tiny Beautiful Things” could easily make for a ponderous drama. But at eight half-hour episodes, the show is both lighter and more nimble than its synopsis might suggest. The downside of this approach is that the series’ source material can feel out of place in its own adaptation. ... The timelines of “Tiny Beautiful Things” are not as smoothly integrated, and suffer from the absence of the performance the show is otherwise shaped around. ... Hahn, however, holds up.

If you’re a Strayed fan, or you’re in the mood for a good cry, enjoy. Otherwise, it is purgatory of quite a different kind.

It describes emotions rather than developing them, and elevates platitude to a dramatic principle. Hahn, a skilled comic actress, is especially poorly served by the show’s jumbling of tones.