Like many scripted series drawn from acts of true crime, Hulu’s “Good American Family” opens each episode with a legal disclaimer. Unlike most disclaimers, however, the language evolves over the course of the eight-episode season. The first half of the limited run, we’re told, “includes certain events as alleged by Kristine and Michael Barnett” (Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass), the Indiana couple accused of child abandonment in 2019. Then, a new perspective interrupts the Barnetts’: Beginning with Episode 5, the dramatized allegations are instead made by their adopted daughter, Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid), a Ukrainian American girl with dwarfism whose protracted conflict with the Barnetts drives the story. The Barnetts’ saga is already well known, with television personalities like Dr. Phil taking a vested interest in their case and Investigation Discovery producing a multiyear, three-season docuseries titled “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.” With its bifurcated structure, “Good American Family” attempts to enliven a familiar tale by way of a twist.
Related Stories
That “Good American Family” makes this reversal so long after it’s clearly telegraphed, both within the show and by prior reporting, is one of many obstacles that prevent the show from doing justice to its difficult, complex material. Created by Katie Robbins (“Sunny,” “The Affair”) and co-showrun with Sarah Sutherland, “Good American Family” can’t avoid tonal whiplash when veering between the Barnetts’ campy, often comic delusion and Natalia’s abject suffering — particularly later, when the pace accelerates and the point of view shifts not episode by episode, but scene by scene. And these are just the internal contradictions. When the external reality of Natalia’s life inevitably intrudes, “Good American Family” buckles under the weight.
Popular on Variety
Even as the whole disappoints, however, “Good American Family” stands out in parts. There’s just enough harrowing sorrow, eye-popping oddity and acting — whether good or hammy, there’s undeniably a lot of it — to make for a transfixing watch. As with all true crime, with or without the gloss of prestige, you may not be locked in for the right reasons, but you also can’t quite look away.
Coming so late in the scripted true-crime trend (after “Love & Death,” “The Act,” “The Staircase” and countless more), “Good American Family” is distinguished by the presence of Pompeo, taking on her first new role since Grey’s Anatomy” gave her a lifetime sinecure nearly two decades ago. Pompeo, also an executive producer, channels some of Meredith Grey’s competence and warmth into Kristine, at least when we’re seeing the character as she sees herself: a crusader for children in general and her autistic son, Jacob (Aias Dalman), in particular. The show opens with Kristine’s arrest for abandoning one child while she’s at a speaking gig bragging about her advocacy for the other, so it’s apparent from the jump that Kristine’s hypocrisy and blindness are very much the point. Still, Pompeo only really gets to push against her entrenched star persona in the series’ latter half, where she goes full “Mommie Dearest” — that is, if Faye Dunaway swapped her Joan Crawford eyebrows for an atrocious blonde wig.
Kristine is so wedded to her self-image as a saintly caretaker that she doesn’t blink twice, or ask questions, when an adoption agency cold-calls to say a child in need has just 24 hours to find a home. What follows is four episodes of what one character calls “horror movie stuff ” — quite literally, once Kristine latches on to the 2009 film “Orphan” to explain Natalia’s behavioral issues. Stuffed animals are dismembered with knives and cleaning spray ends up in coffee, all while Circuit City manager Michael plays the clueless dope. It’s all over-the-top even before Kristine concludes the only possible explanation is that Natalia is secretly an adult who’s conning them out of money for her medical fees, then leaves her to fend for herself in a run-down apartment.
Four episodes is far too much time to spend on an account we later learn is not just unreliable, but likely fictitious. This focus crowds out some essential elements: The flawed legal process by which Natalia was deemed a legal adult — a crucial sticking point later on — is hand-waved in a montage, while foregrounding Kristine’s version of events means we don’t get much insight into her actual pathology besides some allusions to an abusive childhood of her own. Duplass, as convincing a beta male here as he is on “The Morning Show,” makes Michael hilarious in his sad-sack loserdom (I laughed out loud at the use of Green Day’s “Basket Case” as the soundtrack to his aging Gen Xer freakout), but he can’t sell the man’s several sudden changes of heart without more grounding in the script.
The casting of Reid, a 26-year-old Brit, is a curious wrinkle. At first, the actor’s age seems to validate Kristine’s beliefs, adding a creepy edge to Reid’s high-pitched voice and juvenile affect. But as Natalia is thrust into an unforgiving world and forced to grow up too fast, Reid’s performance takes on a world-weary tone. That Reid is able to play her character over a decade of formative years is an impressive showcase for the young actor. The series’ strongest hours, its fifth and sixth, depend most heavily on her nimble switch from menacing to vulnerable.
In the show, Natalia finds the support and patience the Barnetts couldn’t provide in Cynthia Mans (a transformed Christina Hendricks) and her preacher husband Antwon (Jerod Haynes). After the series’ production, however, Natalia went public with allegations of physical abuse against the Manses. This development prompts a hasty, jarring disclaimer after an ending that already rings false for being too neat, forcing a tidy resolution to a messy knot of pain. Documentarian Liz Garbus (“What Happened, Miss Simone?”) directed multiple episodes of “Good American Family,” one of several moves that signal the series’ proximity to actual events. But a blurred line between fiction and truth can be a double-edged sword. A newsy peg can certainly attract interest — yet flesh-and blood people who continue to live their lives after the cameras stop rolling tend to stubbornly resist clean conclusions.
