Just like the entire series, the ending of “Tiny Beautiful Things” — adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling book — is messy.
The eight episodes follow Clare Pierce (Kathryn Hahn) as she starts writing for an anonymous advice column called Dear Sugar, while her own shifting personal life both fuels her responses and brings up other emotions. Clare attends marriage counseling with her husband, Danny Kinkade (Quentin Plair), as the two are not seeing eye to eye in their marriage. At the end of the series, Danny shows Clare a letter that she wrote as Dear Sugar that encouraged the advice seeker to “just go” and let go of something if they knew deep down that it was time.
“Danny has to re-find himself. He has to re-find the man he was that attracted Clare in the first place,” Plair told TheWrap. “I don’t think until he can do the work on himself, he’s not gonna have a chance with anyone.”
Clare never told Danny that she had started writing as Dear Sugar, and Plair thinks that if Danny knew she had written the words he reads to her before he leaves, he wouldn’t have said what he said.
“Probably the realization on her end it’s like ‘Man, this thing that’s hurting so much, I’m finally figuring [it] out. I’m coming to this man willing to work on myself and he’s literally giving me my own words back at me to leave,” Plair said. “I can’t imagine what a person might go through to have their own advice that they’ve given, being used in this sense, in a way against them. That’s gotta be a tough thing to sit with. I know that if Danny knew, she had written those words he would have not said that.”
Hahn agrees with her costar that Quentin made the decision for both of them — a call that Clare didn’t want to make.
“I think that Danny was already kind of going down that path for himself. I don’t think the letter necessarily changed it for him,” she told TheWrap. “I think that if he had known it was me, he would have known that maybe I just would have made that choice first. I just hadn’t given myself permission. I couldn’t take my own advice.”
Showrunner Liz Tigelaar told TheWrap that while she wanted the series to have a solid ending, she would keep working with Strayed if it were an option.
“Limited series are kind of my jam. My mom instilled in me, probably because of endless childhood improv plays, that everything always needs to have a beginning, middle and an end,” she said. “I feel like because of the nature of this mother-daughter story, we really wanted to tell something that felt satisfying and complete with adult Claire’s relationship to her own mother’s death.”
“But of course, you know, I’ve been working with Dessi Gomez Cheryl [Strayed] for a year now. Would I do anything to keep this going and do anything and everything with her forever?” she added. “I could work on ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ for the rest of my life.”
Strayed added, “We can make tiny beautiful a lot of things.”
