Summary
Good American Family works as a thriller in Episode 1 & 2, but is too one-sided to function as a compelling drama just yet.
The Natalia Grace case is such a bizarre true-crime story that it doesn’t really need a dramatization. A documentary – perhaps one like Discovery’s The Curious Case of Natalia Grace – seems like enough. But if Episode 1 and 2 of Hulu’s Good American Family are anything to go by, there’s plenty of mileage in this strange tale as a thriller, one that takes the raw facts and applies some creative license to wring as much creepy tension out of them as possible.
For the uninitiated, Natalia Grace was a Ukrainian-born orphan with a rare form of dwarfism who was adopted by an American family who soon began to suspect that she was an adult impersonating a child in the manner of Jaume Collet-Serra’s well-regarded 2009 horror-thriller Orphan. That movie isn’t based on Natalia, but it’s an interesting point of comparison since there was some speculation that the Barnett family, who adopted her, were inspired by it.
In Hulu’s take, the family’s matriarch, Kristine, is introduced as a successful author – on parenting! – and public-speaking humanitarian who is promptly arrested, introducing the premiere’s ping-ponging multiple-timeline structure. She claims that Natalia was a psychopath who tried to kill her, and then we wheel back to the very beginning to learn how she came to that conclusion, with occasional forays to the future and back again – usually as episode bookends – to build a bit more tension and conflict.
To this end, the double-bill premiere has a few objectives to accomplish. The first is to establish Kristine and her husband Michael as ostensibly decent people who are suffering through a strained marriage following something going wrong with a previous adoptee. Kristine is opening a community centre specifically for children with autism, named after and inspired by her genius autistic son Jacob, and Michael wants to be a girl dad to an almost obsessive degree after the previous failure. So, both are particularly susceptible to a sudden call from a sketchy adoption agency offering them care of Natalia, a disabled girl destined for the inhospitable Ukrainian foster system if someone fails to intervene.
It’s important we really get this because the circumstances of the adoption are suspicious from the get-go. Things “didn’t work out” with the first family who took her on, the agency are clearly covering up some behavioural issues, and the paperwork is all amiss. But Natalia plays the sympathetic little girl to a tee, and immediately begins to appeal to Michael, who she deduces, accurately, is a softer touch.
Across Episode 1 and 2 of Good American Family this dynamic plays out in an increasingly extreme way. Natalia immediately reveals legitimate behavioural issues that go way beyond simple childhood tantrums, and this starts to put a strain on Kristine and Michael’s already floundering marriage because he believes everything Natalia says and Kristine – understandably – does not. This is the other point of the premiere – to establish that this is all very much calculated and intentional.
Mark Duplass and Ellen Pompeo in Good American Family | Image via Hulu
There’s a disclaimer at the start of the show that the vast majority of what is depicted is based on accounts from the real-life Barnetts, but this should be taken with a grain of salt since Natalia’s status as a child at the time they adopted her has since been pretty conclusively proved (even though the Barnetts still maintain their innocence.) But there isn’t much ambiguity in this show. Natalia is explicitly calculating and hostile, cutting the heads off beloved toys, scattering thumbtacks on the front step, causing a massive scene everywhere she goes and, in arguably the most shocking incident, creeping into the Barnett’s master bedroom in the middle of the night brandishing a knife.
I’m led to believe that Good American Family plans to tell this story from multiple points of view, but the first two episodes are very much rooted in the Barnett perspective, which positions Natalia as a villain pretty inarguably. I think this is intentional, and that episodes framed in the viewpoints of other characters won’t be quite so cut-and-dry. We already know, for instance, that Kristine and Michael split up at some point in the future, and that their post-divorce relationship is extremely toxic. Both accuse the other of being delusional liars; Michael accuses Kristine of being Satan. You get the idea.
We also see snippets of what informs a certain character’s viewpoint – for instance, Kristine’s relationship with her highly critical mother is very strained, and this is clearly present as a way to indicate that she’s perhaps overly suspicious of Natalia because of the way she herself was parented. But given what we’ve seen of Natalia thus far – pretty much exclusively evildoing, most of it for no reason at all – it’s hard to see Kristine as being in the wrong. If Good American Family wants to really excel as a drama, it needs to flesh out these other perspectives sooner rather than later.
The premiere ends with Kristine trying to confront Natalia about the gruesome mutilation of a prized teddy and catching her in the bathroom, where she spots she has some hair in places young girls shouldn’t have it, leading her for the first time to suspect that Natalia is perhaps not as young as she claims. This is the real crux of the drama, but thus far, the show needs a feasible alternate perspective if it’s going to work.
