'Tiny Beautiful Things' mines Cheryl Strayed's advice column and life for TV
"Dear Sugar, how do I respectfully take ownership of a source of material that was created by another writer and has a community of admirers who feel a really strong sense of connection to the work?" It was the question Liz Tigelaar, a writer and producer whose credits include "Little Fires Everywhere" and "Casual," wishes she could have posed as she set out to adapt a book of essays based on Cheryl Strayed's beloved online advice column.
Strayed began writing the column under the pseudonym "Dear Sugar" more than a decade ago when she was a struggling writer. She developed a loyal following by dispensing insightful and compassionate guidance on life's hard, messy and heartbreaking conundrums by mining her own experiences. They were the basis for the 2012 collection of essays "Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar." (She later revived the column as a podcast and, more recently, as a newsletter.)
In the new Hulu series, titled "Tiny Beautiful Things," Tigelaar avoided the temptation of having the letter writers be a character in each episode in orbit of its protagonist, Clare Pierce, played by Kathryn Hahn in the present and Sarah Pidgeon in the past, choosing instead to build out the memoir element of the essays.
"I'm almost less curious about how she finds the advice in the present day, externally," says Tigelaar, a self-described Strayed super fan. "How does she find the advice inside of her from what she's already gone through? And how do we bring those stories to the front? It ended up being constructed where maybe the
