If you are familiar with the Natalia Grace case — and the three-season docuseries The Curious Case Of Natalia Grace has given audiences more information on the case than they ever thought they needed — you know that there’s a fundamental dispute between Natalia and the Barnetts over her age. At one point, the Barnetts got her birth year changed from 2003 to 1989, following through on the idea that she was an adult passing herself off as a child. They even set her up in her own apartment in 2011 and moved away. But evidence has tilted back to her birth year actually being 2003, meaning that the Barnetts abandoned an 8-year-old child. A new scripted miniseries tries to tell Natalia’s story from both her perspective and the perspective of the parents that left her to fend for herself.
Opening Shot: Following a lengthy legal disclaimer, we see Kristine Barnett (Ellen Pompeo) walking down a hallway. In voice over, she says, “It was 2019, and I was at the tip of my game. We had finally put the hard times behind us.”
The Gist: Barnett is at a speaking engagement, talking about her book about parenting, including her experience raising her autistic oldest son. All three of her sons are on stage with her. The speaking engagement is interrupted by police, arresting her for child neglect; she automatically blames her estranged husband Michael (Mark Duplass).
Going back to 2010, the Barnett family — Katherine, Michael and sons Jacob (Aias Dalman), Wesley (Liam Anderson) and Ethan (Azriel Dalman) — seem like a pretty cohesive unit. Katherine has been running a daycare for neurodivergent children out of her garage, with grateful well-to-do parents Valika (Sarayu Blue) wanting to help her financially. Katherine, though, feels that they’re set, especially with the grant she’s getting to help set up a rec center that will help autistic kids find their passions in life.
In reality, the Barnetts are hurting, especially after their planned adoption of a little girl fell through at the very last second. Michael, a Circuit City manager, won’t even sleep in the same bed with Katherine because he’s still in pain over it and he thinks she’s already moved on.
Then Katherine gets a call from an agency in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A 7-year-old girl named Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid) is being rehomed by her previous adoptive family, and if she doesn’t find another placement, she’ll be sent to a group home. The girl has dwarfism and some other disabilities.
It takes Katherine a little effort to convince Michael, but soon the entire family is enroute from Indiana to meet Natalia Grace. As soon as Natalia meets the Barnetts she’s calling Katherine and Michael “Mommy” and “Daddy.” The agency drops a surprise on the couple, telling them they’ll owe $7,000 to reimburse the previous families for Natalia’s surgeries.
Almost as soon as Natalia starts back to Indiana with her new family, Katherine sees signs that something is amiss, from Natalia’s violent outbursts to the seemingly too-close attention and permissiveness Michael gives to the girl. An incident while she was setting up the opening of her rec center leads her to think that Natalia might actually want to harm her.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Good American Family has a similar feel to another “torn from the headlines” series The Act.
Our Take: The idea behind Good American Family, created by Katie Robbins, is that half the series will be from the Barnetts’ perspective and the other half will be from Natalia’s perspective. Of course, what that creates are two extreme narratives, with half the series showing just how Natalia might have been an adult passing as a child and the other half showing the Barnetts being cruel parents willing to abandon a child and have her fend for herself.
If you don’t know that going in, though, the almost-cartoonish depictions of Katherine, Michael and Natalia that we see in the first episode seem ghoulish. In the first episode, Katherine is seen as saintly, with a plucky zeal to make sure her son Jacob and others on the spectrum are treated with the respect they deserve. Michael is seen as an easily-manipulated man child.
When we meet Natalia, she’s depicted in a way that’s more creepy than anything else. She looks like an adult in child’s clothing, and she talks like a teenager instead of a 7-year-old. Whenever she calls her new parents “Mommy” and “Daddy,” we cringe. It’s obvious that this is being done on purpose, but the lack of nuance was still a complete turn-off.
While the extensive disclaimer at the start of each episode points out the conflicting viewpoints of the case, it’s telling that the actress playing Natalia, Imogen Faith Reid, is an adult. An adult is needed to play the grifting version of Natalia, whose mannerisms and speaking are way beyond her supposed age. But how she’ll pull off Natalia as an actual 7-year-old under the alleged abuse and neglect of the Barnetts will be interesting to watch.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Katherine wakes up late at night to see Natalia at her bedroom door, holding both the bunny stuffy Katherine got for her and a knife.
Sleeper Star: Aias Dalman is very watchable as Jacob, the Barnett’s oldest son. He’s a prodigy, studying quantum physics in college at 13, but because of his autism, has sensory issues and difficulty in social situations.
Most Pilot-y Line: Michael’s employment at Circuit City doesn’t seem to be incidental; a major first-episode scene takes place in the store’s red-trimmed breakroom. One problem: Circuit City went out of business as a brick-and-mortar retail store in 2009, the year before Natalia’s adoption.
Our Call: SKIP IT. There are some stories that are not well served when they’re made into scripted dramas. Because of the muddled details, the Natalia Grace case is one of them, and the lack of nuance in Good American Family is a good indicator that viewers are better off watching docuseries about Natalia’s case rather than this drama.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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