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The Problem With Hulu’s Show Based on the Infamous Story of Natalia Grace
Good American Family stars Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass as the Barnetts, who accused their adopted daughter of secretly being an adult.
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Almost everyone involved in the tabloid saga surrounding Natalia Grace has a story they’re frantically trying to tell the world about themselves. That’s a problem for Good American Family, Hulu’s new limited dramatic series based on the case that aspires to arrive at some stable truth. Showrunners Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland gesture toward a Rashomon-style exploration of the many clashing perspectives on Natalia, but, by show’s end, the series makes its own judgments pretty clear. It’s unfortunate that after Good American Family had finished filming last year, the explosive documentary series that made Natalia Grace famous dropped a new season in January, revealing that the warmhearted, salt-of-the-earth saviors whom Good American Family picks as its heroes may not be such heroes in real life after all.
For newcomers, here are the basics: Natalia was born in Ukraine in 2003 with a rare form of dwarfism and was surrendered by her birth mother to an orphanage. When the first American family she was placed with in the United States found themselves unable to provide her with the care she needed, Natalia was adopted by Kristine and Michael Barnett, an Indiana couple, in 2010. In 2012, the Barnetts successfully petitioned the county court to have Natalia’s legal age changed from 8 to 22, claiming that she was an adult posing as a child and that she had threatened Kristine, Michael, and their three sons.
The Barnetts’ claims became the subject of a sensationalized 2023 Investigation Discovery documentary series, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, which in its second season followed up by presenting Natalia’s counterclaim—since proven—that she was in fact only 8 years old when the Barnetts installed her, alone, in an apartment and departed for Canada. The rare true story that can be related with the kind of twists more typically found in fiction, Natalia’s ordeal seemed to conclude with some heartland-pleasing uplift when a big, pious family took her in and adopted her. Yet that second season ended on an uncertain note, one that suggested all was not well in Natalia’s new home. Sure enough, Season 3, released two months ago, revealed that Natalia is now estranged from her third adoptive family and living with a fourth, this one made up of other little people. How could any dramatization keep up?
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As a documentary, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace had to get by without the input of Kristine Barnett, who called the film series “sensationalized” in a statement. Good American Family, however, is free to speculate. Played by Ellen Pompeo, this Kristine epitomizes that most hateable of demographics, a white suburban middle-class woman preoccupied with her own virtue. The story this Kristine’s selling is that she saved her son Jacob from doctors who told her that his autism made it unlikely that he’d ever speak or live independently. Refusing to accept this, Kristine developed her own educational program for Jacob that revealed him to possess genius-level gifts in mathematics and physics. As the Hulu series opens, she’s spinning this success into a book and a chain of day care centers for disabled children.
The first four episodes of Good American Family present Kristine’s version of what happened after the Barnetts decided to adopt Natalia. This tale, the series implies, was strongly influenced by the 2009 horror film Orphan, in which a family is terrorized by a grown woman posing as a 9-year-old child. Kristine cites the movie when discussing her suspicions with her best friend (Sarayu Blue). Natalia (Imogen Faith Reid) shows a marked preference for the gullible, needy Michael (Mark Duplass), playing the adorable kid when her adoptive father is around and saving her evil smiles for Kristine when his back is turned. At one point, Natalia steals and mutilates one of her adoptive brother’s favorite stuffed animals and appears in Michael and Kristine’s bedroom at night, holding a knife.
As Good American Family would have it, before the adoption, Kristine expected to add another rescued child to her résumé. “When God has a job for you, he gives you everything you need to get it done,” she tells the initially reluctant Michael. Natalia proves a more difficult project than Jacob had been, but Kristine cannot admit—to herself as much as to the world—that there are limits to her God-given powers to help disabled kids. Instead, she convinces herself that Natalia isn’t a kid at all. For a while, Good American Family seems to be deploying the classic “she was right all along” trope so popular in women’s fiction, but Kristine is no Cassandra. She’s a woman desperately fighting to preserve the narrative that holds her life together. “Do you think she believes all her lies?” a character asks Natalia near the end of the series. Natalia doesn’t care, but Good American Family seems to think that Kristine does.
The last half of the series switches to Natalia’s perspective after the Barnetts abandon her in a shabby apartment. She watches TV all day, goes without bathing because she hasn’t got the strength to turn the taps on the tub, and resorts to gnawing on bricks of uncooked ramen when she gets hungry. Reid, who clearly relishes the range she gets to show here—from smirking goblin to vulnerable waif—holds on to Natalia’s essential oddness, the product of unknown but formative trauma. If Natalia weren’t so unlike anyone the people around her had met before, it would have been much harder for the Barnetts to convince them that she was an adult.
Salvation comes in the form of the ever-sumptuous Christina Hendricks as Cynthia Mans, wife of a preacher and foster mother to a house full of children, not all of whom are her own. “I was born to be a mother,” she tells Natalia, who, after some initial resistance, happily sinks into the puddle of kids that gather around her. Good American Family doesn’t shy away from the use the Mans family made of Natalia’s benefits, but it’s hard to believe that Hendricks in earth-mother mode, telling sassy truths and dispensing hugs, could be anything but benevolent.
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At first, aware that people interviewed in Season 3 of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace say they witnessed Cynthia’s husband slapping Natalia, whipping her with a strap, and locking her up in a room, I assumed that Cynthia’s down-home maternalism, like Kristine’s TED Talk–style inspirational motherhood, would soon be revealed by Good American Family as just another false narrative. Certainly the Mans family’s habit of conspicuously joining in prayer in public spaces like courtroom lobbies seems every bit as off-puttingly performative as Kristine’s TV interviews. Not that there isn’t a surprising amount of God talk from both sides in Good American Family—when Kristine and Michael lock Natalia in the garage as a punishment, the cop who comes to check out the neighbors’ reports of screams is readily pacified by Kristine’s mentioning what good, churchgoing Christians the Barnetts are. But it comes across that Good American Family’s creators really do want viewers to view Cynthia and Antwon Mans’ family—working class, casually groomed, multiracial—to represent real Christianity and real parental love in contrast with Kristine’s uptight, appearance-obsessed, self-centered, careerist versions of both.
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