Warning: This article contains spoilers for all of Good American Family.
Before Good American Family, creator Katie Robbins had never done true crime before. And she wasn’t exactly looking to try it out. But then she started reading about Natalia Grace, a young girl with a rare form of dwarfism who was abandoned by her adopted parents after they believed her to secretly be an adult.
“As I was reading the articles and watching the Dr. Phil interviews, I experienced this feeling of my understanding of the story switching so much depending on whose version of events I was reading,” Katie Robbins tells Entertainment Weekly. “And that seemed really fascinating to me and really true of the way that we interact with kind of any story — we’re bringing our own experiences to it.”
Robbins knew how she wanted to tell this story: With the first half of it coming from the perspective of adopted parents Kristine (Ellen Pompeo) and Michael Barnett (Mark Duplass), and with the back half of it switching to Natalia’s (Imogen Faith Reid) perspective, causing viewers to question everything they thought they knew in the first part of the series.
Disney
Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia Grace and Ellen Pompeo as Kristine Barnett in ‘Good American Family’
“I really wanted to play with that question of perspective and of bias, particularly around disability and the justice system and the ways in which we as a society are often really primed to believe one set of people’s kinds of stories and not another set of people, not a set of people who are different from us,” Robbins says. “And that’s really dangerous. So that became the way to try to tell the story.”
With the perspective shift at the core of the story, Robbins and her team of writers also had to figure out where to end the story, given that real-life developments are still occurring.
“When Hulu first approached me to do the show, it was back in 2020. But by the time we were really in full throttle in the room, the docuseries had come out,” Robbins says. “And so suddenly it was so much more in the ether and the popular consciousness. And so it was this kind of trick of how much do you acknowledge that? How much do you not acknowledge that?”
Once again, Robbins focused on one element of the story: The trial to change Natalia’s age back.
“At the end of the day, the thing that is, to our mind, the scariest about it is that there was biological evidence that was available and presented, and that wasn’t enough to change Natalia’s age in the court of law,” Robbins says. “That happened while we were in the writers’ room, the decision was handed down, and then Kristine’s charges were dropped. So that felt like the right place to end this kind of the arc of the season.”
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Good American Family is available on Hulu now.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
