Hulu's The Girl from Plainville adds a human dimension to the Michelle Carter "texting-suicide case"

The Boston Globe

The Girl from Plainville, from creators Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus based on a 2017 Esquire article of the same name on the Michelle Carter case, only manages to dodge being the kind of tabloid dramatization that Lifetime is known for, says Matthew Gilbert. "While the likes of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace and Pam & Tommy have framed their bad situations with bigger notions about the roles of homophobia and sexism, respectively, The Girl From Plainville has no explicit point of view to justify itself," says Gilbert. "What it does offer, though, is an extraordinary cast led by Elle Fanning, Colton Ryan, Chloe Sevigny, and some tasteful scripting that manage to add a human dimension to people whom much of the media had reduced to cutouts. The eight-episode miniseries doesn’t reevaluate or answer any legal or psychological mysteries about the so-called 'texting suicide case,' nor does it take sides on the legal issues. But, with a bit of fictional license, it deepens our perceptions of those involved."

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• The Girl from Plainville struggles to justify its existence: "in trying to ascertain Michelle and Conrad’s toxic dynamic, The Girl From Plainville narratively flounders with overwrought script choices (think lots of unclear timeline-jumping). It’s despairing and moves along at a crawling pace," says Saloni Gajjar. "The eight hourlong episodes lose impact, especially when the last three are essentially reenacting Michelle’s trial (also the focus of HBO’s docuseries). In the end, it’s a foreboding, straightforward true-crime drama with only hints of innovative storytelling. The show’s intriguing points about how both teens viewed their looming relationship get lost in the shuffle."
• The Girl From Plainville takes pains not to romanticize or condone Michelle and Conrad’s choices: "Suicide prevention PSAs bookend each episode, and the punishing misery hanging over the entire show makes it clear just how oppressive and far-reaching the consequences of their actions have been," says Angie Han. "But the more time we spend wrapped up in their perspectives, the harder it becomes to swallow the outside world’s understanding of Michelle as simply a villain and Conrad as her victim — particularly given the nuance Fanning brings to her performance as a girl who transforms throughout the series from a sweet-faced innocent to a desperate romantic to a haunted, expressionless shell of her former self."
• The Girl from Plainville is a sad series that must be watched slowly: "Deeply sad, minutely detailed, The Girl From Plainville...can be a tough watch," says Chris Vognar. "The gears grind as we observe two troubled teens fumble through what turns into a sick kind of love, needy and ultimately lethal. There are no answers here, which is perhaps appropriate; the crime remains a painful enigma."
• The Girl from Plainville manages to make a series based almost entirely on text messages work: "The sight of someone with their face buried in a phone is hardly novel, nor is it compelling — at least not enough to sustain an eight-episode drama," says Daniel D'Addario, adding: "Its depiction of the virtual relationship between Carter (Elle Fanning) and Coco Roy (Colton Ryan) will keep viewers hanging on, if only just. The pair appear to one another as if they were really present, having an ongoing conversation. It’s only when one or the other are distracted by their real lives — a parent or a friend asking Michelle or Coco to turn their respective attention away from the phone — that the illusion shatters, and that they slip apart."
• I Love You, Now Die better captured the Michelle Carter case: "Hulu has enjoyed a solid run of late with fact-based limited series (see The Dropout and Pam & Tommy) featuring young blonde women in very different predicaments, and the appetite for true crime -- particularly with this sort of modern, youthful twist -- appears pretty near unquenchable," says Brian Lowry. "Still, viewers frankly came away with a much better sense of Carter's story from the HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die than they will from watching this. Truth can be stranger than fiction, but in this case, nonfiction is considerably more illuminating than drama.
• If nothing else, The Girl from Plainville at least gives us a human story to consider: "Some things genuine and vulnerable and open-minded, and not simply a story that one young person battling mental illness was the victim of a monster. We’re presented instead with the possibility that two humans were orbiting each other’s mental illnesses," says Kim Potts, adding: "This retelling of a true crime scandal transcends the pop culture frenzy and pithy headlines and attempts to tell a real human story."
• The Girl from Plainville finds a nuanced way to tell Carter's story: "In the wrong hands, The Girl From Plainville could have felt exploitative, but showrunners Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus serve up a nuanced, balanced and creatively intriguing approach to the material," says Richard Roeper. "We’re outraged by Michelle’s lies and manipulations, but as portrayed by Elle Fanning in a finely calibrated performance, Michelle also comes across as a sad, lonely and troubled young woman who was under some sort of delusional belief she was actually helping Conrad by encouraging him to end his suffering and leave this world for a better place."
• The Girl From Plainville isn't the story of a murder but a bewildered look at the gnarled and bewildering relationship between teenagers and their phones: "For a better brief on the legal issues, hunt down HBO's superb 2019 documentary I Love You, Now Die," says Glenn Garvin. "But when it comes to unraveling the tangles of digital adolescent psychology, or at least observing it lucidly, The Girl From Plainville is a better bet. It portrays Michelle (played brilliantly by the emerging star Elle Fanning) as an emotional vampire who greedily appropriates Coco's fascination with suicide when he's alive and his family's fractured grief when he dies. She's also an untethered fantasist whose roadmap of her own life consists mostly of imagining herself in scenes from the high-school musical melodrama Glee. The show's most chilling scene is one in which, to play her self-assigned role as the martyred girlfriend, she stares into a mirror while mimicing a grieving tribute to a departed Glee character. Are her feelings real, or plagiarized? Does she know? Or care?"
• Elle Fanning shines as Michelle Carter: "In a nuanced performance, where nuance might easily give way to histrionics, Fanning finds surprising variety in Michelle without making her seem too self-contradictory; indeed, the series is ordered in a manner to make us regard her initially with skepticism and later with a degree of compassion — at first, a manipulative liar, organizing events to her own emotional advantage, and then a person whose relationship with the truth is complicated beyond her ability to understand it, a girl not in control," says Robert Lloyd.
• Fanning is able to convey all these different faces of Michelle Carter — the opportunist, the manipulator, the scared little girl — with such aplomb: "Even when she’s left to wear Carter’s unfortunate darkened eyebrows and stiff hair, there’s a vulnerability underneath her that, again, might not have been Carter’s but works within the series," says Kristen Lopez. "It’s Colton Ryan, though, who balances out Fanning’s performance. For all the ways Carter is presented as too clingy and needy, Ryan’s Coco Roy makes her human as he requires her strength and validation to make him feel whole."
• Viewers will be disappointed if they watch The Girl from Plainville seeking answers: "All of that adds up to a series that is as much about how these two teens process feeling misunderstood and marginalized as it is about what Michelle Carter did and why she did it. If you come to The Girl From Plainville seeking answers to questions that start with why, you’ll be disappointed," says Jen Chaney. "One of the flaws in this well-acted but overly drawn-out limited series is that we never get sufficient insight into Michelle’s behavior. Considering that creators Liz Hannah (The Post) and Patrick Macmanus (Dr. Death) adapted this from an Esquire article about a widely publicized case, the lack of added perspective may make some wonder why they need to watch a scripted version of a story they already know. That said, the first three episodes that drop on Hulu today — the remaining five will roll out weekly — make a strong case for The Girl From Plainville as a character study, particularly of Michelle, played by Fanning with instinctive fluidity." 
• Writer Jesse Barron describes the journey to getting his "The Girl from Plainville" Esquire article adapted for TV: "There’s this feeding frenzy of intellectual property in Hollywood," he says, whose article was published in 2017. "There's so much autopilot and trashy, garbage true crime that I just feel like doesn't serve anyone and is exploitative. I was sensitive about that. And I also was aware of the cliché of if, when your thing gets bought, like the drive from New York—now I live in L.A.—but drive from New York to L.A.. (You) throw the book over the fence, catch the bag of money, drive back to New York. They used to say just don't get involved because it's going to be destroyed, right? But this is different because the central heart of this story is the relationship between these two teenagers that no one can access without dramatizing. That's what makes this truly different. And that's not a line. I really believe that this is a story where the core of what happened is inaccessible to nonfiction in some fundamental way. I'm sure there's going to be things that people who are represented in the series don't like or they disagree with. And that's true for nonfiction, too."
• Elle Fanning says she related to Michelle Carter because of her own childhood experiences: "That was the entry point for me that I could really understand because I was in high school, having social media, texting and feeling those feelings that we all feel of false intimacy and that adrenaline rush that we feel when you get a text from a crush," she explained, adding that she hopes the show will help "destigmatizing mental health."
• Creators Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus did not want to relitigate the Michelle Carter case: “We were really trying to approach this story with empathy, without judgment, and look at the humanity of each of these characters—not just Michelle, but of Conrad, and of (Conrad’s mother) Lynn, and of everybody involved,” says Hannah. “This was never about relitigating the case, but trying to look at these people and the story that happened to them.”