“Tiny Beautiful Things” is one of those shows whose appeal lies in reflecting back to viewers their own problems and attitudes (or the ones they imagine they have); it describes emotions rather than developing them, and elevates platitude to a dramatic principle. Hahn, a skilled comic actress, is especially poorly served by the show’s jumbling of tones — when Clare acts out, the soap-opera extremity of the writing and staging feels out of sync, and it’s hard to sympathize with the character the way we’re clearly supposed to. (It’s also unfortunate for Hahn that she doesn’t get to play scenes with Wever, whose portrayal of Clare’s rock-solid mother is the best thing in the show.)
The Apple TV+ mini-series “The Last Thing He Told Me” is, from some points of view, a lesser project than “Tiny Beautiful Things.” It’s a mother-daughter story, but it’s one told in the form of a crime thriller — a wife and her discontented stepdaughter are forced to work together as amateur private eyes when the husband-father disappears amid a corporate scandal.
The suspicion of genre superficiality is enhanced by high-gloss scenery and aspirational lifestyle signaling. The wood artist Hannah (Jennifer Garner), her tech-whiz husband, Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and their querulous teenager, Bailey (Angourie Rice), live on a houseboat in Sausalito — why not? — and shooting locations include the marketplace at the San Francisco Ferry Building (Acme Bread, natch) and the playing surface at the Giants’ beautiful Oracle Park.
The series stumbles around for a few episodes while it establishes the Hitchcockian ambience (circa “Vertigo” and “The Birds”) and puts in place the clues to Owen’s past that will pay off in later revelations. (The seven episodes run from just 37 to 45 minutes, and the pace is generally brisk.) But it quickly gels into a better-than-average whodunit and a superior family drama, one whose denouement hits you with surprising force.
Much of the credit must go to Dave, who adapted her own book, and to Josh Singer, who created the show with her. Both the mystery plot and the relationship between Hannah and Bailey develop organically, with dramatic restraint and emotional credibility. The story hits very few false notes as Hannah finds a resourcefulness she hadn’t needed to deploy while Owen was there, and as other people in her life — including, eventually, Bailey — rally around her.
(One thing that rings false is the portrayal of Hannah’s best friend, a reporter played by Aisha Tyler, who ignores the big business story that falls in her lap so that she can chase down leads for Hannah. It’s an odd glitch given that Singer wrote the celebrated newspaper movies “Spotlight” and “The Post.”)
But “The Last Thing He Told Me” owes its success mostly to Garner, a wonderfully natural and instinctive actress who gets to play a character with an echo of her breakout role in the spy thriller show “Alias”; across the series, we see Hannah getting in touch with her inner Sydney Bristow. And Rice, the Australian actress who plays Betty Brant in the current “Spider-Man” movies, matches up well with Garner — the tension between stepmother and stepdaughter is palpable but never overplayed. In the Witherspoon television universe, Garner and Rice put “The Last Thing He Told Me” near the top of the ranking.
