I love TV pilots. I think it’s because I enjoy TV as a genre a lot, and a well-done pilot is the beginning of something, the setup that you need to know to get invested. And yet pilots are super difficult to pull off right. Most of us can name at least a couple of shows off the top of our heads that did not have great pilots, and yet we ended up loving them anyway. It’s harder to name a bunch of great pilot episodes of TV.
And yet Worried, from director Nicole Holofcener and co-writers Lesley Arfin and Alexandra Tanner, might just be my favorite thing I watched at Sundance 2026. It’s near the top of my list, for sure. The TV adaptation of Tanner’s bestselling novel Worry, the pilot follows sisters Jules (Gideon Adlon) and Poppy (Rachel Kaly) as they try to just… live and do so in this complicated world we all now exist in.
The thing about Worried is that it’s funny and it’s relatable, and it’s also a little (very) messy. But that’s what makes Jules and Poppy work. They’re worried about a lot of things, and they have their fair share of issues, and even if we can’t exactly relate to their specific issues, we can relate to the worry. And, perhaps, we can even relate to the way having your sister there makes everything a little bit better.
Being an adult is hard, in general. You have to know so many things and do so many things every day to maintain the facsimile of adulthood that you’ve tricked people into believing. And, sometimes, we forget that it’s good and even cathartic to just laugh about our problems. Jules and Poppy remind us of that in an episode that doesn’t really need much more than the two of them.
I vividly remember watching Girls on HBO and wondering why people were even connecting to it. And yet, there is something about what that show tried to do, and what it succeeded at, that works for me in the way Worried is selling it. Perhaps it’s just that this feels very 2026 in every worry. Maybe it’s just that Jules’ overt anxiety and Poppy’s internal angst are two sides of the same coin we all feel like these days. But Worried feels impossible to look away from, and such a good reminder that we all share a lot of the same concerns.
As the episode ends with the two of them at a place that shouldn’t really be surprising—some shared experiences mark us—Jules and Poppy remain. “Personally, I think our best 9/11s are still ahead of us,” Poppy says. And perhaps that makes them horrible people, as she remarks not that long after. For saying it. For thinking it. For worrying. But in 2026, it feels like more than half of what we do every day is worry. And Jules and Poppy make us feel a little better about that.
Worried was part of the Episodic Fiction Pilot Showcase at Sundance 2026.
