SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the first three episodes of Hulu‘s Good American Family.
By the third episode of Hulu’s Good American Family, audiences may very well be wondering how anyone can dispute that Natalia Grace terrorized her adopted family, the Barnetts, in the three years she lived with them.
But, as co-showrunner Sarah Sutherland warns, no one should jump to conclusions just yet.
“This episode is basically setting bread crumbs that will then get paid off in the end,” she tells Deadline.
By the end of Episode 3, Kristine Barnett (Ellen Pompeo) is good and well convinced that Natalia (Imogen Faith Reid) is out to get her. She thinks that Natalia is not actually a child, based on signs of puberty, and when she finds a used tampon under a piece of furniture while conducting a news interview with her son, Kristine flies off the handle.
After confronting Natalia’s previous adopted family during a trip to New York, Kristine presents her husband Michael (Mark Duplass) with what she believes to be unequivocal evidence that Natalia is playing them. According to Kristine, Natalia is not only an adult, but she’s working with the seemingly fake adoption agency First Path to con the Barnetts to into paying for her extensive surgeries — and she’s also potentially trying to kill Kristine while she’s at it.
In the interview below, Sutherland broke down the episode with Deadline and explained why viewers should watch to the very end of the series before making up their minds about this bizarre case.
DEADLINE: What interested you about Episode 3, specifically, that made you want to write it yourself?
SARAH SUTHERLAND: I love this episode. The big theme of this episode is about how terrible the unknowable is. When you have this situation where it seems like you’re adopting a child, you have these hopes for it, and yet suddenly everything doesn’t quite seem like it should. I was just really interested in how hard it would be to be in that position and how to dramatize that while also keeping all these other things about the story in mind.
DEADLINE: I find it very interesting that, to this day, there are wildly different accounts of what happened. How did you tread into all of those different perspectives to form a full picture of the situation?
SUTHERLAND: So the first step was a tremendous amount of research. It was a huge part of our writing process. We had an incredible researcher who was actually on the ground in Indiana as the trials were going on. We had all the different documents and reports and interviews that were part of the discovery process, just a tremendous amount of primary research. So our jobs were, at first, just to sit with it and really try to figure out, what’s the story here? Because it’s a very salacious, kind of wild, specific story that happened. We wanted to find a way to figure out what’s the human story here. What is the universal theme that we’re wanting to explore that also makes it worthwhile to do a whole show? While this has been really discussed a lot, and there’s the documentary, we felt that there were elements and themes that hadn’t quite been explored as much as they could be. So we really focus in on [the idea that] this is a show about bias. It’s about these questions of, Who do we believe? Who do we not believe? The elusive nature of truth. The hope with the perspective idea — to start with one perspective and then to sort of shift throughout the season — is to bring audiences along on that journey of grappling with their own bias in the way that we did really while we were doing the research.
DEADLINE: How did your own perspective on the situation shift as you were making the show?
SUTHERLAND: Well, so, Katie Robbins created the show. She and I met on The Affair almost a decade ago, but one of the things I love the most about her vision for it was that it had this perspective element, actually, from the very beginning. She started in 2020. So, at that point, there was no documentary. The trials hadn’t happened. So she was just using the internet, and seeing all these articles. She’d read one, and it would seem like, ‘Oh, this is the story.’ Then she’d read another, and ‘Well, no, that’s the story.’ This question of Natalia was its own Rorschach test, basically. So she had the idea to do the Rashomon-style structure. The answer would be different depending on who you ask.
So I came on after she did, and at the time when I came on, the research actually was pretty conclusive in terms of Natalia’s real age…I don’t want to ruin things for the the viewers, since we’re only on Episode 3 here, but a lot of stuff was really quite clear. I think the most devastating part of the story itself is that the facts of the case, like the things that actually are empirical facts, were not allowed to be treated as facts, both in the court of public opinion and also the court of Indiana. So part of my surprise, and the shifting surprise that I continue to have, is the degree to which that’s still true. So our show is working from the place of knowing that, and yet trying to take audiences on a journey toward figuring that out for themselves.
DEADLINE: The beginning of the episodes have a legal disclaimer that point out some events might have been ‘imagined or invented’ for dramatic purposes. What was the balance like to still keep it authentic?
SUTHERLAND: This was the main question that we asked ourselves on a regular, constant basis in the writers room, and also as we moved into production, was how to bring audiences on that journey toward reflecting on their own feelings. In order to do that, the first four episodes, people really have to relate to the Barnetts. They have to feel like they’re a part of that story. So one of the main things that we did, that we talked a lot about in terms of how to navigate that, is using tone. There’s elements of camp to it in the beginning that are really intentional, that are designed to both represent what is a stylized telling of the story from the perspective of the Barnetts that then will shift once we shift to Natalia’s perspective. But also, to show that you’re not watching a totally real dramatization there. There is some fiction there. So that was one of the main tools, and I think that the actors and directors were just really incredible at that.
DEADLINE: How did you chart this path where you would lead the viewer one way, only to shift perspectives and make them question everything?
SUTHERLAND: We really want to encourage people to watch to the very end, because things do not end where you think that they’re going to from the beginning. In this episode, you start to see some of the cracks in the marriage that will come back. This episode is basically setting bread crumbs that will then get paid off in the end. Part of the fun of the bread crumbs, and the planting of easter eggs is, how do you do it such that, when you watch it for the first time, you’re not smacked in the face with it, but so that if you watch it a second time, you might think, ‘Oh, I see.’
It was a constant juggle of how to make this something that will allow you to feel like empathy for Kristine and Michael. They’re worried about their child’s safety. Yet, how to have these moments where you catch them in sort of some fallibility. We talk about Michael as someone who, when he’s presented with something that’s scary, he goes into denial mode. He denies, denies, denies. Kristine’s the opposite. When she’s presented with something that she doesn’t understand — Michael says to her, actually, in Episode 3, like ‘You see ghosts everywhere.’ She always assumes the worst. So the two of them really conflict. So one of the ways we humanize them, or hoping to humanize them, is by making their marriage one that people can relate to. You have these two people who are experiencing something unusual and yet don’t know quite how to handle it.
DEADLINE: I think the method through which this story is told raises a lot of points about the way the world consumes true crime content in general. People are very quick to jump to conclusions based on limited information. How did you reflect on that while working on this show?
SUTHERLAND: One of the most insidious things about bias is that it’s so often unconscious. All of us go around in our daily lives, and everything that we’re doing and saying and thinking seems to make sense to us. We think it’s benign. Some of the greatest crimes in history were perpetrated by people who thought they were doing the right thing, by their definition, from their perspective. That’s actually way more terrifying, I think, than a person who’s like, ‘I will murder you’ and knows they want to murder. There are people like that out there, and their stories that are very captivating, but this is actually a little bit creepier to me. This idea that a person could go about their life thinking they’re doing what’s right for them and what’s right for their family, and yet, from another person’s perspective, what they’re doing actually seems not only horrible, but criminal.
DEADLINE: Is there a scene in the episode that was particularly impactful to you?
SUTHERLAND: I’d say that the scene that I loved the most writing…was the the fight scene between Kristine and Michael in the dressing room before they go on Glenn Beck. I love nothing more than a really long, juicy marriage fight where both parties think they’re so right and have some element of right on their side, and yet are just acting out of such embarrassing errors. I think that was just extremely fun to write and to see. I mean, Mark and Ellen both love to play fight, and they just gave us so many incredible options for that one.
DEADLINE: Can you talk more about seeing Mark, Ellen and Imogen bring this episode to life? It’s a hugely emotional episode and you’ve got Mark and Ellen, who are very experienced actors, and Imogen as a newcomer. This is also Ellen’s first big foray outside of Grey’s Anatomy. What was the process with the three of them like?
SUTHERLAND: It was really rewarding. I’m sure everybody has to say something like that, but I mean, genuinely, it was such a dream, and they’re all so different from each other. So Ellen’s like this titan of television who also is somehow a really good time. Everybody wants to be Ellen’s friends. She’s just so charming, so real, and so experienced. I mean, watching her on set is like watching an athlete and a magician and an artist all rolled into one. The fact that she can make you feel like she’s just your buddy, while her being obviously Ellen f*cking Pompeo is just a really incredible combination. Mark is someone who just makes you feel like you’re the center of the universe and that everything’s going to be okay all at the same time. Then he shows up for his scene, and it’s as if he’s the center. I don’t know how he pivots so well. Imogen, she’s such a star and to be able to be to work with someone who is clearly destined to be a star, in my mind, who hasn’t yet become one, in a role that is so challenging — she’s playing multiple ages from multiple perspectives in a dialect that’s not her own. It was, to me, like a career highlight to watch her in action.
DEADLINE: Had you cast Imogen when you started writing? There are so many moments that are highly dependent on her performance.
SUTHERLAND: Yes. The show is actually green light contingent on casting a Natalia, because it’s a very niche role. Her capacities had to be incredible. As you’re saying, to be able to play that campy monster version in the beginning and then…the back half is my favorite in terms of her performance. Before I saw her audition, I was very nervous about it. How is someone going to pull this off? How old are they going to be? Can they handle this? As soon as I saw it, I felt like, ‘Oh, okay, she just has it. She’s got that skill.’ I mean, I’ve genuinely never seen somebody with this little experience be this incredible. She works really hard for it. She had an acting coach, she prepped, she had a movement coach, and, especially in these first four episodes, she would give us different versions, so that when we were in the editing room, we had the option to sort of tweak, because all of landing that tone is those small moments. A little bit, goes a long way in terms of her looks to Kristine, and she gave us just such a wide range.
DEADLINE: Mark recently spoke about his hesitations to join the show, wondering if the world really needed another true crime, ripped from the headlines story. Did you have any questions about that? How did you reflect on that?
SUTHERLAND: Yeah, you’re speaking to my inner monologue. This was a challenging show. We all approached it with this kind of big question mark of, should we be telling it? How to tell it properly? The honest answer for me was the bias against little people in general, and bias against people with disabilities, is something that’s just not that well understood, because not that many of us are little people, not that many of us have disabilities, and yet there are lots of real, wonderful humans who experience that, and yet aren’t seen on TV. So this story felt like a unique way to explore these questions of bias in a way that hadn’t been done before. Despite there being so much information out there, people still have questions about Natalia that they should not have. I think that the hope here is that people tune in, at first, perhaps because of the usual reasons you tune in for true crime, and yet stay and feel somewhat affected by the journey that they go on, on a meta level, with grappling with their own bias, their own tendencies to believe certain people over others, their own tendencies to read a certain headline and think one thing instead of another thing.
DEADLINE: After Episode 3, what should audiences look forward to from the rest of the season?
SUTHERLAND: I think that, especially for people who aren’t very familiar, but even for people who are, the main thing is that they will be surprised what happens next. The hope is that if they were to watch it a second time, they would be able to see the breadcrumbs that were there all along, even when we’re in one person’s perspective. Because a thing we talked about a lot, that I I find terrifying, but also fascinating, is that we as humans tell on ourselves, like all the time. We think that what we’re saying and doing makes sense, that within our own minds it does. I hope that people get a more clear sense of what happened to Natalia, and that provokes some questions about society that are interesting and hopefully for the better.
