


The series is more interested in watching Hannah and Bailey work together to unravel the knots of Owen’s former life. There is no real violence here, which I appreciate (though the threat is hinted at). “And will find moments and chestnuts in the show that take you deeper.Tonally, the series initially starts off like a thriller but evolves into a mystery - and to its benefit. “I want this to be something that people who love the book will love the show,” Singer tells TIME. Singer had never adapted a piece of fiction before, and he wanted to preserve its strengths while delving further into the backstories of its characters. In 2021, The Last Thing He Told Me became a bestseller (spending 65 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list), and soon Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine had purchased the rights to make the story into a miniseries.

And as Dave was struggling through writing, Singer asked a question that allowed her to spin her thoughts in a different direction: What if Owen was bad? (The eventual character is more complicated than a good/bad binary.)

In 2016, Dave gave birth to her son, which made her realize that The Last Thing He Told Me was, at its base level, about motherhood. In 2011, Dave married screenwriter and producer Josh Singer (who won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Spotlight), and one of their wedding gifts was a woodturned bowl, which would inspire Hannah’s profession as a woodturner, using spinning wood lathe to sculpt bowls, tables, and furniture. I love the different ways we figure out how to show up for each other.” “And I have friends who I’ve been friends with since I’m three years old, and the phone rings at 4 a.m. Speaking with TIME on an unseasonably warm April day, Dave says she felt like a mother long before she had her own child-she already had five godchildren. Read More: The 47 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2023 “We often become mothers to people we don’t birth, we find our families in people we may not have planned for, we define home and love in ways that may be more generous and fulfilling than our younger selves could have imagined.” Marshall (Augusto Aguilera) assigned to the case.Ĭreating The Last Thing He Told Me was one way to “lean into the idea that no version of motherhood is more honorable, more important, more ‘natural,’” Dave writes in a Q&A included in the back of the book. Writing can access interiority in a way that television can’t, so rather than hearing Hannah’s thoughts, the show reveals more backstory: between Hannah and her grandfather, between Owen and his former father-in-law (David Morse), and about the U.S. The series stays largely faithful to the novel, incorporating in one more character to help flesh out Bailey’s background.
