S01.E08: Love

[AnimeMania]

(Season Finale)

Fresh off shocking news from Danny, Rae reveals who really dropped off the missing money – causing Clare to bring Rae along on a mad dash road trip to Clare’s childhood home. In the past, Clare rushes to get Lucas to the hospital for Frankie’s last days.

Premiere Date: April 7, 2023    Hulu

[QQQQ]

I didn't know anything about the series prior to watching it this weekend, but really enjoyed it. Falls into that Mrs. Fletcher, Big Little Lies genre.

[ruffy666]

I am definitely against running shows into the ground but in this case... if this show doesn't get a second season, I think it'd be a real shame.

If you've never read the book Tiny Beautiful Things, it is one of the loveliest, heart-wrenchingest compilations of advice columns that you could ever imagine.  A real tear jerker but not in a bad way.

[txhorns79]

On 4/9/2023 at 12:05 AM, QQQQ said:

I didn't know anything about the series prior to watching it this weekend, but really enjoyed it. Falls into that Mrs. Fletcher, Big Little Lies genre.

I really enjoyed the series.  This last episode just brought all the tears.  Though I will say that I knew the moment Claire went to go look for her brother in the flashback, that her mother would be gone before she got back.  I don't know if it needs a second season, as it felt complete to me.  However, I'm all for more Kathryn Hahn! 

[SoWindsor]

On 4/17/2023 at 4:05 PM, ruffy666 said:

I am definitely against running shows into the ground but in this case... if this show doesn't get a second season, I think it'd be a real shame.

If you've never read the book Tiny Beautiful Things, it is one of the loveliest, heart-wrenchingest compilations of advice columns that you could ever imagine.  A real tear jerker but not in a bad way.

Is Clare supposed to be the author and is Clare's story exactly the author's story?

[ruffy666]

On 5/5/2023 at 7:21 PM, SoWindsor said:

Is Clare supposed to be the author and is Clare's story exactly the author's story?

There are some elements that are similar to Cheryl Strayed's story but I don't believe it's explicitly autobiographical

[paramitch]

I deeply disliked this show, and I am so bummed at that. I loved Cheryl Strayed's Wild -- it is a beautiful book and an equally stunning film. I loved her flawed yet humanistic, believable character and cared about her.

But this? Oof.

I really hated Clare. It's so disappointing. I'm a fan of unlikable or difficult to like characters. And Kathryn Hahn? In something by Cheryl Strayed? I was all in at first.

But Clare wasn't, for me, unlikable and complex yet lovable. Just awful. I was just not able to like or care about her.

I feel like the show thinks Clare is "honest" and "brave" and rootable. Maybe she is. I just think she's an unstable, callous, deeply narcissistic asshole with Main Character Syndrome.

She has spent this entire story blatantly disregarding and stomping all over other people's boundaries and causing them pain while just as blatantly overlooking her own culpability -- hurting her daughter, her husband, her daughter's friends, the woman at the care home, her best friend, etc. I get that the show thinks this is where we get to see her make "progress," but ugh -- I just can't. Like last episode where she's a dick to her best friend (like she is to every other person in her life), then I guess I'm supposed to get all misty because she comes back the next morning and says something nice to her friend? After how many years of passive-aggressiveness (and just plain aggressiveness) and general selfishness? Nope.

I just loathed this character. This entire show, every single episode, she's like a grenade constantly going off and wounding people while she remains oblivious -- and, usually, screaming about HER pain. The example that still stays with me is how, after hurting and humiliating her daughter to her daughter's crush, her daughter understandably wants space to herself in her own bedroom, so Clare then camped outside her door for entire night (just to make it All About Her yet again).

And in this episode, for instance, Clare yet again goes full-on rage demon, ramped to 11, at the news that her decades-estranged father paid back the money she stole from her daughter's college fund, at which news Clare then lets/bullies her unlicensed daughter to drive them where she needs to go, spends much of the journey screaming at her daughter and then -- the worst moment for me -- yanks her steering wheel over, terrifying her daughter and almost wrecking them to get them to take the exit she suddenly demands. Then, of course, she proceeds to scream at everyone in her path, including the hapless hardware store people for the damn shovels, then we get the impromptu grave-digging (I mean, JFC) and more predictable screaming and tantrums at her brother, and -- more understandably -- her formerly abusive father and she will not even let either one of them speak a complete sentence in response.

Then -- weirdly and jarringly -- she's suddenly all sweet and calm for her Hallmark "lying in the fields" moment with her daughter and the horse herd? 

Ugh. Too little, too late.

What I don't understand is that for the final pivotal confrontation, we have to watch as this monumentally selfish woman -- who has obliterated boundaries with everyone around her for decades while assuming everything she does can be condoned if not forgiven -- cannot even conceive of the idea that her father may have changed, or at least may have some regrets, in his old age? It has been something like 30 years since she saw him. Further weakening this is the fact that we got maybe one or two brief flashbacks the entire 8 episodes so we don't know how to take what he says to her here.

Further -- yes, abuse is horrific and understandably traumatizing, and I say this as someone who experienced it. I think abusers need to be held accountable and victims believed. But I do think one thing fiction consistently seems to oversimplify is this idea that an abuser cannot really change, and even when they seem to change (a la "Big Little Lies"), they're simply lying again.

And I would argue that this is frequently not true, especially in the case of parents who are abusive when very young. Some can and do grow, change, and repent, especially across decades. I've experienced this myself, in the best way, but have rarely seen it addressed IRL. (One rare fictional exception -- there is a great moment in Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, in which the protagonist Tom's children are meeting his semi-estranged father. "Careful, he hits," says Tom. "Not anymore," says his father, tiredly. Pages of meaning in two lines of dialogue.)

Instead, we get that big final sequence with Clare at her most unhinged, screaming and crying about her mother's death and other events that happened 30+ years prior, hysterically trying to dig up her mother's grave (!), and not even letting her father or brother, who are both attempting to speak with her kindly, calmly, and quietly, speak or explain themselves. Then suddenly we get the beatific stuff with her daughter and everything's okay? I would argue that she's just spent a few hours actively traumatizing her own daughter, oblivious as always to her impact on others.

And as a Wild fan, I also really dislike the fact that this feels like Strayed just rewrote Wild as her own fanfiction. The story beats are just so similar that by the time we got here, I knew because I'd read Wild that Clare's mother would die when she left to go find her brother, because that's what happened in Wild. I knew her mother's last word to her because it was the same as her actual mother's last word to her in Wild. This entire miniseries just feels like she added a two-decade postscript to Wild: "Contrary to this lovely and satisfying story, she never got over any of it and spent the next 20-30 years being a truly awful person, a terrible mother, a terrible wife, and taking her suffering out on everyone around her."

I kept watching waiting to be moved. As of this finale, I found it occasionally enraging, and very briefly and (okay) intermittently moving. I was glad she and her daughter had a moment of grace at the end.

But even apart from the sheer awfulness of Clare, I just found so much weird and unsatisfying and unexplained here. Why is this seriously visibly unwell person not in individual therapy? Why was her daughter such a cliched TV teenaged asshole (and why was it supposed to be a victory that she did that cruel thing to her BFF/crush)? And why is Clare in marriage counseling with a visibly creepy therapist who did seem to be perving on her husband? Why am I supposed to care about Clare when even in the very end, she was still untruthful with her husband about her cheating with the Uber driver (and others)?

I'm so mystified by the positive response here, much less for this show's positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, so maybe it's just me. But I did not find this remotely worth the 4 hours of my time. Except as a demonstration that sometimes, the writing cliche is true, that some people really only have one story in them -- their own -- and now Cheryl Strayed has told it twice.

On 5/8/2023 at 7:41 AM, ruffy666 said:

There are some elements that are similar to Cheryl Strayed's story but I don't believe it's explicitly autobiographical

I would argue the opposite. 8 out of 10 major plot elements are directly out of WILD:

• She's an asshole teenager with a slacker younger brother and a barely seen abusive father
• Has a saintly mother who puts up with her thoughtlessness constantly, goes back to college with her (and is understanding even when not allowed to "know" her at school)
• Sick mother loves horses and dies much faster than prognosis
• Main character's last dialogue with mother is verbatim from WILD; she then misses her mother's death because she goes to find her brother (and identical to book, returns to find her mother dead in the room)
• Main character then cheats on sweet husband and falls into heroin addiction and self-abuse.
• Main character even 25-30 years later is still doing all of the above (except heroin) with her mother's death as excuse. She has still not processed the loss, forgiven her brother (who did nothing wrong), or spoken to her father (which is understandable).

etc.

This show is 90% Wild in flashback, then adds in the pregnancy and weird "30 years later" stuff (and the timeline with the 16 year-old doesn't work there at all, so I still don't know what was up with that). Then the "Dear Sugar" stuff on top as the icing on the cake.

I know it's based on real life that Strayed wrote the advice columns, but I seriously do hope she was a better person in real life than the fictionalized Clare who is presented to us here. Because for me now it's still gross that the awful Clare was so much more kind and compassionate and forgiving of strangers than she was shown to be here, to her actual loved ones.

 

Edited July 2, 2023 by paramitch
Forgot to address quote

[heatherchandler]

I just watched this and wow - terrible show.  I don’t like Kathryn Hahn, sorry, I know she has a lot of fans.  She annoys me.  

Love Merritt Weaver, but even she could not save this show.  I can’t imagine it will get a second season.

[paramitch]

On 3/12/2024 at 9:26 PM, heatherchandler said:

I just watched this and wow - terrible show.  I don’t like Kathryn Hahn, sorry, I know she has a lot of fans.  She annoys me.  

Love Merritt Weaver, but even she could not save this show.  I can’t imagine it will get a second season.

I usually love Kathryn tremendously, but I did not like her here. I just felt like it was a badly directed, overacted (oh my God, so much), self-indulgent "Look at me" performance. Every time she was onscreen, I cringed. It was all dialed up to 11, all the time.

Merritt was one of the only performances and characters I liked her.

And ugh, I just full-body-shuddered at the idea of this getting a second season. Please, God, no more of these awful people.

Edited March 14 by paramitch
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