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There has rarely been a child whose life has been so publicly examined as Natalia Grace’s.
The Ukrainian adoptee with a rare form of dwarfism generated international headlines over the past decade after her adoptive parents, Indiana couple Kristine and Mark Barnett, convinced a court to change her legal age from 8 to 22, and then abandoned her in an apartment. Years later, Kristine and Mark were criminally charged with neglect, although Mark was acquitted and charges against Kristine were later dropped. In 2023, Natalia legally restored her birthdate to 2003 after extensive DNA testing.
It is a sensational story, and grimly fascinating. How did the Barnetts come to suggest that Natalia was an adult posing as a child? What went on in their Indiana home? Where is Natalia now?
All of these questions have been asked and answered ― and allegations made and denied ― in countless news reports and Investigation Discovery’s three-part 2023 docuseries, “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.” The young woman, now 21, has told her story many times. But now a fictionalized Hulu drama is going to speak for her, and it does no better job representing this sad tale than a decade’s worth of exploitative tabloid headlines and the rather crass docuseries did. We’re right back at sensationalism and exploitation, and the resulting TV show isn’t even that good.
“Good American Family” (streaming Wednesdays, ★½ out of four) stars Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass as the Barnetts and British actress Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia. Over eight episodes it chronicles their stranger-than-fiction story, first from the Barnetts’ point of view, then from Natalia’s. In the first four episodes the couple are portrayed as selfless parents to a nightmarish sociopath who planned to kill them and their biological sons. In the last four, Natalia is a victim of neglect and violent abuse by the Barnetts and later, a terrible miscarriage of justice by the courts. But this hamfisted and half-hearted approach to a rippped-from-the-headlines series has nothing new to say.
It’s a “having cake and eating it too” approach to the conflicting allegations between the three principal players, but the “multiple perspectives,” as helpfully pointed out by the legal disclaimers at the top of each episode, don’t offer insight so much as incoherence and dissonance. The first half of the series is fundamentally opposed to the second. Was Natalia a violent threat? Were the Barnetts neglectful and abusive? The answer, according to Hulu and creator Katie Robbins (“The Affair”), is seemingly yes to both. So in the first four episodes we watch a knockoff of the 2009 horror film “Orphan,” and in the last four a parade of horrifying child abuse.
The messiness of the structure, and the lack of care with which the scripts tell this sensitive story, make “Family” an unpleasant and bleak watch with no narrative sense. The actors are all working tirelessly with the material they’re given; they are not at fault. Reid is a multifaceted discovery (although she’s 27, which seems a questionable choice). It may be odd to see Pompeo, the doctor of America’s emotional wounds for two decades on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” without scrubs or a doctor’s coat, but she wasn’t resting on her acting laurels for all those years. Her Kristine is as repugnant as she is delusional, and Pompeo can play a villain as well as a hero. Duplass slides easily into his role an ineffectual loser (no offense). Christina Hendricks shows up, nearly unrecognizably, in the second half of the series as Natalia’s unofficial new mother, with a slight drawl and a warm hug. You can almost forget the awful reality of what you’re watching in the face of such talented performers.
This hand-wringing and bothsidesing is an illogical and terrible way to structure a TV show, but it is an especially infuriating way to depict this young woman’s life, which has already been the subject of so much distasteful public scrutiny and debate. It is an immutable fact that she was a child while in the care of the Barnetts and after they abandoned her, yet online commentary continues to wink and nod to the idea that she was an adult con artist living out a horror movie. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the Barnetts’ allegations about her behavior are true: She was still a child when they left her alone in an apartment. Children all over the world have violent behavioral problems, yet we don’t suddenly decide they’re old enough to live alone.
“Family” is a series that really should not have been made. In our cultural thirst for true-crime content, we can sometimes cross a line. Not every awful thing we read in the news needs to be an Emmy-hopeful limited series with a famous cast. Sometimes tragedies are just that.
Our curiosity over Natalia Grace should be well sated by now.
