Good American Family review – the strange case of Natalia Grace
Ellen Pompeo plays a mother disturbed by her adopted daughter in a mostly entertaining limited series based on the tabloid sagaThere remains unending interest in the bizarre story of Natalia Grace, the Ukrainian girl adopted by an American family who then claimed she was actually an adult. The saga starts in 2010 but a similar tale had already been told in 2009’s Orphan, a horror film hinged on a similar twist, itself inspired by the real case of the Estonian impostor Barbora Skrlová. It’s the ghoulish stuff of nightmare, shocking enough to turn Orphan into an unlikely franchise (the second was released in 2022, the third now in the works) and Grace into a tabloid sensation and, easily vilified, hate figure.But the lurid People.com headlines only told half of the story or barely a third as it turns out, an unfolding series of revelations soon starting to show that things were not what they appeared to be. After a popular, and even more revelatory, docuseries, we now have the inevitable narrative version – the long-read-to-documentary-to-limited-series pipeline remaining robust – but how to tell a story when no one involved is willing to agree on what actually happened? In Hulu’s efficiently watchable eight-parter Good American Family, The Affair and Sunny writer Katie Robbins decides upon a structure that allows for competing perspectives and a shifting timeline. Continue reading...
Ellen Pompeo plays a mother disturbed by her adopted daughter in a mostly entertaining limited series based on the tabloid saga
There remains unending interest in the bizarre story of Natalia Grace, the Ukrainian girl adopted by an American family who then claimed she was actually an adult. The saga starts in 2010 but a similar tale had already been told in 2009’s Orphan, a horror film hinged on a similar twist, itself inspired by the real case of the Estonian impostor Barbora Skrlová. It’s the ghoulish stuff of nightmare, shocking enough to turn Orphan into an unlikely franchise (the second was released in 2022, the third now in the works) and Grace into a tabloid sensation and, easily vilified, hate figure.
But the lurid People.com headlines only told half of the story or barely a third as it turns out, an unfolding series of revelations soon starting to show that things were not what they appeared to be. After a popular, and even more revelatory, docuseries, we now have the inevitable narrative version – the long-read-to-documentary-to-limited-series pipeline remaining robust – but how to tell a story when no one involved is willing to agree on what actually happened? In Hulu’s efficiently watchable eight-parter Good American Family, The Affair and Sunny writer Katie Robbins decides upon a structure that allows for competing perspectives and a shifting timeline. Continue reading...
