Kathryn Hahn finally got her mainstream breakout with WandaVision in 2021, which means the last couple years have been full of premium Kathryn Hahn content, including Glass Onion and The Shrink Next Door. Now, before she reprises the role of Agatha Harkness in Marvel’s Agatha: Coven of Chaos—which is likely now coming in 2024—she is headlining the latest product from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine hit factory, a limited series adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things.
I’m not going to lie, when I first saw Tiny Beautiful Things dropped a new trailer my mind scanned it as Tiny Secret Whispers and I thought Seth Meyers was doing an elaborate bit, but no, this is a real trailer for the real adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things.
The book is a collection of essays from Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice column from the early 2010s. Hahn stars as “Clare”, a fictionalized version of Strayed, struggling with her marriage and her daughter at a low point in her life. Sarah Pidgeon plays the young Clare, and Merritt Weaver is on board as Clare’s mother, Frankie. I don’t particularly care for the Hello Sunshine house style of “empowering white women through crime”—you’d think it would be right up my alley because of the crime, but the only time it’s worked for me is in Gone Girl, which is a satire of the exact kind of commoditized girlbossing Hello Sunshine traffics in—but I will watch this just for Kathryn Hahn.
I have sat through some truly awful stuff for her sake before, I can do it again. Especially since it’s going to be a longer wait for the “Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza playing rival witches” show, which just makes me long for Hahn and Plaza to co-star in a revenge fantasy set during the Salem Witch Trials. Maybe that can be Tiny Secret Whispers season two.
