• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 6, 2023

A new Hulu series is another TV show about a writer -- in this case, one who never reached her potential after a triumph back in college.

In the show -- “Tiny Beautiful Things” premiering on Friday -- she is working as an administrator at an assisted living facility at age 49, while also dealing with a marital crisis.

The character, Clare, also has a troubled younger brother to manage. She also drinks too much. Indeed, her bartender is a close friend.

Who better to portray this human train wreck than Kathryn Hahn (above photo), for whom this role seems tailor made. 

She has previously played characters carrying on and acting out in midlife, most notably in the “Bad Moms” movies. In those movies, she played a single mom with a penchant for partying.

Most of her previous roles were entirely comedic. But in “Tiny Beautiful Things,” the tone is more dramatic than comedic, although the show’s story is told in half-hour episodes.

The last new show that turned up recently about a writer was also on Hulu -- the Y2K musical “Up Here,” which premiered on March 24.

In that one, a young woman dumps her husband in a stifling small town or suburb and then moves to New York with no money to try and fulfill her ambition to become a writer.

In these TV and movie stories, the dreams of these prospective writers are always centered on scoring fame and fortune with the next great novel.

They are almost never about writing history books or articles for science journals or journalism, the latter representing a more direct route to being published -- writing about TV, for example.

In any case, Clara does get a writing opportunity in Episode One of “Tiny Beautiful Things” as the anonymous writer of an online advice column called “Dear Sugar.”

The crux of the matter is that strangers with problems of life and love write to “Sugar” for advice on handling the same kinds of problems Clare deals with.

By the end of Episode One, Clare has not yet written her first published reply to a “Dear Sugar” letter. But she is about to.

The pilot of “Tiny Beautiful Things” sets up the show nicely -- at least nicely enough to stick around for Episode Two to see what kind of advice Clare can provide to the lovelorn and heartsick.

“Tiny Beautiful Things” starts streaming on Friday (April 7) on Hulu.