From a business standpoint, it’s rarely much of a mystery why this ripped-from-the-headlines true-crime miniseries or that one exists. The subjects are already household names. The topics at hand, typically scammers or serial killers, spark seemingly endless fascination. Make it polished enough, and it could go all the way to the Emmys. You can practically hear the studio exec arguing that not making this show would be leaving money and prestige on the table.
If the bottom-line calculus is clear, however, the creative impetus isn’t always. Just as often as not, what results from this impulse to lightly fictionalize a recent news story is an overly straightforward telling of the same facts we’ve been barraged with already. Maybe there’s a version of the Natalia Grace saga that could cast a new light on an already extensively covered case, or simply add enough panache to make it feel worth revisiting again. Hulu’s Good American Family isn’t it.
In its defense, the intent to set the record straight on a narrative plagued by misinformation is a noble one. As Brandon (Dulé Hill), a detective who becomes Natalia’s champion in court, puts it to her, “If you tell a story well enough, the truth doesn’t always matter.” And Michael and Kristine Barnett (played by Mark Duplass and Ellen Pompeo in the series) spun an irresistibly juicy one, in which their adopted daughter was not a 7-year-old child with dwarfism but an adult woman posing as much younger, for nefarious if ill-defined purposes.
None of that turned out to be true — Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid on the show) was in fact the little girl her papers had indicated before the Barnetts legally “re-aged” her to 22 and abandoned her in her own apartment. But the “2009 film Orphan, but real life” angle proved sticky enough that as recently as this January, a sympathetic People interview with Grace ran under the headline “Victim or Villain?”
Creator Katie Robbins has the opportunity, then, to rewrite the salacious cultural narrative as the horrifying tale of child abuse it always was. To that end, her drama resists sensationalizing the Barnetts’ claims, and then rejects them all together. It invites us to sit with the young Natalia in her hardest days, engendering sympathy for a figure too often treated in popular culture as a joke. It ensures that what we’re left with is heartbreak for her, and anger toward the guardians who so callously mistreated her.
But it takes so long to get there that the luxury of time starts to work against the show. The languorous first half depicts “certain events as alleged by Kristine and Michael Barnett,” as the requisite legal disclaimer goes, from their decision to adopt Natalia in the Liz Garbus-directed premiere to their decision to ditch her. The portrait of the couple is clear if not especially complex. Duplass’ Michael is a dud, sorta sweet but totally spineless. Pompeo’s Kristine is the super-mom building a career out of telling and retelling the story of how she saved her autistic son, and trotting out the reluctant kid as living proof of her goodness. Their personalities don’t evolve so much as they intensify.
By contrast, the case they — and by extension Good American Family — build against Natalia is unconvincing. Her waving a knife around during an argument could be an act of menace, or it could be the behavior of an impulsive and oblivious kid. The beheaded stuffed animal under her bed could be a sign of her sadism, or simply a consequence of a child playing too rough. And so on, and so on.
The sense of doubt is certainly purposeful. But watered down by so much of it, these scenes play like a horror movie without either the horror-movie jolts or the horror-moving pacing. The noncommittal tone reads as responsibly sober but also tedious. Four hour-long episodes turn out to be an awfully long way to go for the suggestion that the truth can be murky — especially when the next four go ahead and dispense with that ambiguity entirely.
The mid-series pivot to Natalia’s perspective on her abandonment, and her subsequent legal battles against the Barnetts, is harrowing even if you know exactly what’s coming. Little Natalia is so ill-equipped to live alone that she struggles to turn on the shower or use a can opener. She spends her days zonked before the TV or crying for the mommy and daddy she still wants to believe will come get her. When outsiders see Natalia for the child she is, she parrots the line drilled into her by Kristine: “I’m 22, I just look young for my age.” Sometimes she says it casually, as if trying to get the lie over with. Other times, she says it more insistently, fearful that Kristine will punish her if she lets the truth slip.
Reid shows tremendous range in a performance that spans from ages seven to 19, through all manner of trials and moods. Though at 27 she naturally looks older than Natalia, she makes up for the gap with a raw interpretation that never gives into precociousness or self-consciousness. To watch her Natalia struggle is unbearable, sometimes to a degree that made me question what I was doing here at all — what I was meant to gain, really, by watching a fictionalized re-enactment of the real suffering of a real person.
This is not a new conundrum for this genre, which centers almost by definition on the worst events of people’s lives. Some find their purpose in delivering spectacle (Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story). Others go deep on the psychologies (Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville) or institutional forces (FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven) that led to this moment, or extend compassion in unexpected directions (Hulu’s Under the Bridge).
Good American Family, in trying to bring justice to a person who’s been dragged into a cruel spotlight against her will, does a little bit of it all. But without the distance of time, or the liberation of broad creative license, or the ambition to focus on a bigger picture, it yields not much more than a re-enactment of facts we already know, stretched over eight difficult hours. It becomes just so much more grist for the true-crime mill.
