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USA TODAY’s TV critic Kelly Lawler breaks down the best TV shows you don’t to want to miss this spring.
For 21 seasons, Ellen Pompeo has been the heart-rate monitor of ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.” Now the Golden Globe-nominated actress is (temporarily) trading the comfort of Grey Sloan Memorial for what she feared could be the end of her career: the role of Natalia Grace’s adoptive mother in Hulu’s limited series inspired by the saga.
“I said, ‘This seems like walking through a landmine field; this seems like Cancel City,’” Pompeo shares candidly in an interview, where she seems unguarded and full of interesting observations about the human condition. “How are we going to do this? What version of this story are we telling? And are we going to portray someone with dwarfism as evil?”
Even if you’ve heard of Grace, you might not fully grasp her story, or all of the “they said, she said.” Over eight episodes, “Good American Family” (streaming weekly on Wednesdays) tells a dramatized version of Grace’s journey, first from the perspective of Kristine (Pompeo) and Michael Barnett (Mark Duplass) and then from that of the Ukrainian immigrant-born with dwarfism (Imogen Faith Reid).
The Barnetts hoped Grace would be the perfect complement to their family when they adopted her in 2010. Instead, they claim she terrorized them, placing thumbtacks on the stairs for her family to step on, and trying to kill Kristine, Michael said in a 2019 interview with “Good Morning America.” The Barnetts successfully petitioned Grace’s birth year to be amended from 2003 to 1989 in 2012, moved her into an Indiana apartment and relocated to Canada. But a more recent DNA test concluded that Grace is much closer to her original birth year, meaning she would’ve been just a child when she was forced to fend for herself.
With such varying accounts, co-executive producer Sarah Sutherland says, she and series creator Katie Robbins “did a tremendous amount of research.” Before becoming a TV writer, Robbins “was a journalist and a documentarian,” Sutherland says. “And I used to work in economics research. So the way in which we’re nerds actually services this kind of project really well.”
Robbins noticed that perception of the events was influenced by whose point of view was being shared. “It was this roller coaster going through the articles, and it became this Rorschach test: How you saw it depended on who was telling the story and what biases and background you were bringing to the story,” she says. “That was really fascinating to me, and so I wanted to try to bring that into the experience of watching the show and really use it as a way of talking about perspective and bias and the elusive nature of truth.”
Speaking with Robbins put Pompeo more at ease, and so did the actress’s agent, she says, who encouraged, “This is the turn to take,” she recalls. “Really turn things on its head and show people a completely crazy side of you.”
But the key for the miniseries was Reid. The onscreen mother-daughter duo met on a Zoom call that lasted hours, Pompeo says. They had that electrifying chemistry. Reid “walked me through what this project meant to her,” Pompeo says, “and her perspective and how important she felt like it was to tell her version of this story.”
Pompeo welcomed the responsibility of making a mindful, watchable TV show inspired by true events.
“‘Grey’s’ has other challenges,” she says. “But I really wanted something that really challenged me and to see if I have what it takes.”
“I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years,” she adds. “And if I fall on my face, I fall on my face. This was something that I could put 200% of my effort into and let’s just see what happens.”
Pompeo says she’s in preliminary discussions to appear in seven episodes of “Grey’s” next season, the same number as this season.
“I absolutely am so privileged to be able to say that I get to be a part of it, still, and the fans love that, and with a commitment that works for me and makes me able to fill my life with other things,” she says. “I don’t know if there’s been a next-season pickup or not. But they know that I love that show and that’s 20 years of my life and that I always will pop in and out and make appearances.”
But after decades of playing Grey, it’s the mad roles that provide Pompeo’s world more color. “I would love to have more opportunities to keep playing crazy characters,” she says.
