Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things masterfully establishes Clare’s street cred as an expert on love, mistakes, regrets, and loss. Kathryn Hahn’s performance in this series is a straight-up revelation, a chaotic, unhinged, and gloriously messy portrayal of a damaged, big-hearted woman that effortlessly shifts between comedy and drama without missing a beat.

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.

“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 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.

“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.

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.

Somewhere en route from the "Dear Sugar" phenomenon to a collection of essays to a stage play and then a TV series, someone lost the plot. Or failed to formulate one. That someone, evidently, was creator and showrunner Liz Tigelaar, who has reduced the advice-columnist hook to a virtual afterthought and produced a wearying storyline that never quite arcs. ... The "payoff," such as it is, comes nowhere close to justifying the anguish of all eight episodes.