Hulu’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ tells a tale of loss, grief, and love

In the new series Tiny Beautiful Things, out Friday on Hulu, Kathryn Hahn plays a writer whose life is falling apart, and she tells ABC Audio that her character Clare is just “a mess.”

“Professionally her job is not something that she had ever really aspired to be her marriage…she’s been kicked out, so she’s kind of couch surfing. Her daughter is in the middle of an identity crisis…figuring herself out, themselves out,” Hahn explains. “And Clare is trying to catch up and she’s just screwing everything up left and right.”

The limited series is based on the best-selling collection by Cheryl Strayed, and Executive Producer Liz Tigelaar shares that the show deals a lot with misconceptions surrounding loss and grief.

After being in the writers room with many who have experienced great losses, Tigelaar says, “it just showed me the importance of telling a story that’s not about moving past loss, but how grief and loss become embedded in you and woven into the fabric of who you are.”

“And that there even can be these tiny, beautiful things that even come out of the hardest, darkest things that you wish hadn’t happened,” she adds.

Ultimately though,TinyBeautiful Things is about love.

“I think that the story we’re trying to tell is a true one. And I don’t mean, you know, whether it’s autobiographical or not. I mean true to what what love is, which is it contains a lot of contradictions,” Hahn expressed. “You can be absolutely flattened by grief, by, for example, the loss of your mother. And you can also make really beautiful things of what was the hardest experience of your life.”

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