Who Is the Real Villain in Hulu's 'Good American Family'?

For anyone searching for the truth in the Natalia Grace story, the last place to look is Good American Family, the dramatized true crime series starring Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass as Kristine and Michael Barnett, the couple who adopted a seven-year-old girl with dwarfism in 2010. The episode opens in 2019 with Kristine’s arrest for child endangerment and neglect before flashing back to recount the saga from the beginning.

The most important thing any viewer—or at least, any viewer seeking the truth—should know comes in the legal disclaimer that precedes the first episode.

What’s buried in that disclaimer for those unfamiliar with the real events is that when it says the series “dramatizes multiple conflicting points of view” and that events are presented “as alleged” by Kristine and Michael Barnett, what it actually means is that Kristine and Michael Barnett are full of shit.

This is the same approach taken by the ID documentary series The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Instead of presenting reality, the series regurgitates Kristine and Michael Barnett’s allegations. It’s like taking Steven Avery’s version of events in Making a Murderer or O.J. Simpson’s account of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson at face value.

The Barnetts’ version of events is convenient—for them. It’s not the “whole truth”; it’s the version they want us to believe. It’s misleading, but it also makes for a far more compelling television drama than the actual truth, which is that this is what Natalia Grace really looks like.

No reasonable person would believe that this was a 22-year-old woman masquerading as a child. But it’s easier for viewers of Good American Family to buy into the fiction when Natalia is played by Imogen Faith Reid, a 27-year-old actress with dwarfism.

Once you see an actual image of Natalia Grace, the show’s disclaimer and the events of its first two episodes suddenly click into place: Kristine Barnett was rightly arrested for child neglect and abandonment after legally changing Natalia’s age from 8 to 22, leaving her alone in an apartment, and fleeing to Canada.

That’s the work of a deranged woman. And my assumption—or at least my hope—is that as the series unfolds, it will shift to present Kristine Barnett as the real villain of Good American Family.

This isn’t necessarily an indictment of the show. It’s compelling, despite the hokey acting and clunky writing. But it’s also deliberately dishonest—something that’s at least more understandable in a dramatization than in an actual documentary. Done well (and I have my doubts based on the first two episodes), it could be a riveting story about an evil, unreliable narrator—if the series eventually makes that pivot. Because as it stands now, viewers unfamiliar with the actual crime at the heart of the story are far more likely to sympathize with the abusers than the child Hulu’s show portrays as some kind of gaslighting mastermind.