Cheryl Strayed is best known for her critically acclaimed memoir, Wild, which details her solo trek down the Pacific Crest Trail and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon last year. But Strayed’s not just an intrepid hiker with a penchant for hurling boots off cliffs. From 2010 to 2012, Strayed moonlighted as Dear Sugar, a once-anonymous columnist doling out, as she put it, “the by-the-book common sense of Dear Abby and the earnest spiritual cheesiness of Cary Tennis and the butt-pluggy irreverence of Dan Savage and the closeted Upper East Side nymphomania of Miss Manners.”
In 2012, Strayed rounded up the best of her Dear Sugar columns and turned them into a book called Tiny Beautiful Things, full of her strange and lovely advice on everything from existential angst to errant love affairs. Somehow, Hollywood has just figured out a way to turn this concept — strangers writing emails to each other — into a TV series.
The Oregonian reports that Strayed, Witherspoon, Laura Dern (who played Strayed’s mother in Wild) and Strayed’s husband, filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, pitched and landed a development deal with HBO for a series based on Tiny Beautiful Things. Here’s how HBO describes the show: “This one-hour drama will explore love, loss, lust and life through the eyes of a Portland family who live by the mantra that the truth will never kill you.” (Clearly the HBO logline writer has never seen I Know What You Did Last Summer.) Strayed added that the show will “be a drama with a lot of humor in it. We’re really excited about it.”
Witherspoon and Dern, who’ve spent the past year starring exclusively in Strayed’s Instagrams, are signed on as both executive producers and stars, with Dern playing an advice columnist and Witherspoon playing an incessantly cheerful overachiever (probably).
