TV Review: THE GIRL FROM PLAINVILLE: Season 1, Episode 1 [Hulu, SXSW 2022]

The Girl from Plainville Season 1 Episode 1 Review

The Girl from Plainville: Season 1, Episode 1: Star-Crossed Lovers and Things Like That is the first in an eight-part limited series set to premiere on Hulu. Lisa Cholodenko directs this first episode of the Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus-created series, a dramatization of the infamous “texting suicide case”. Elle Fanning portrays Michelle Carter, the titular girl from Plainville, Massachusetts.

The episode opens on the morning of Sunday, July 13, 2014, with the discovery of 18-year-old Conrad Roy III’s (Colton Ryan) body in his pick-up truck, poisoned by carbon monoxide. His separated parents (Chloë Sevigny and Norbert Leo Butz) are wracked over the suicide of their eldest child, with his mother Lynn taking it exceptionally hard – mostly due to the fact that she had full custody of him at the time, and that Conrad left a note for both his father and Michelle but not for her.

This note to Michelle stirs up further questions within Lynn: who is Michelle Carter, and why had she never heard about her prior to her son’s death?

The episode cuts back and forth between multiple parallel arcs, particularly three main ones: Lynn and her ex-husband, Conrad Roy II, attempting to make peace with their son’s death; a local Mattapoisett, MA, police detective (Kelly AuCoin) scavenging for any clues about the teen’s sudden suicide; and Michelle herself as she copes with the death of her boyfriend.

Michelle’s arc is by far the strangest of these three. While that sounds like a cruel way to describe the trajectory of a young person who’s just lost their partner, it’s an accurate representation of its out-of-left-field nature for everyone else in Michelle’s orbit. Neither her parents (Cara Buono and Kai Lennox) nor her friends knew who Conrad was, much less that he was dating Michelle. They feel that Michelle’s sudden and excessive emotional duress is uncharacteristic of her, and while they want to be supportive they also feel like she’s leaving them out of some loop. Even Lynn, who meets Michelle for the first time at Conrad’s funeral, seems suspicious of her and her (re)actions … as if she’s harboring hidden motives.

And that’s just what Hannah and Macmanus are insinuating, as they end the episode on Michelle post-argument with her parents, about to hold a memorial fundraiser in Conrad’s honor, practicing an emotional musical number from Glee in front of a bedroom mirror with her eyes soon drying up and her mouth cracking into a slight smirk. It’s definitely the most affecting moment in the episode and even the most damning, suggesting some sinister intentions beyond a teenage fling gone awry. It’s also where Fanning’s stoic performance and Cholodenko’s straightforward direction finally click, fitting the material more appropriately as it makes the dark moral implications of the series more prevalent.

Personally speaking, the actual historical event was not on my radar at the time it unfolded (crunch time in film school was a beast), so this was all a bit unfamiliar to me. That being said, it’s hard to not learn about the case with nary a cursory Google due to its stark nature and its kids-and-technology moral panic angle. (Hell, there was even an HBO documentary about it!) That’s all to say that it doesn’t seem like The Girl from Plainville will be offering any new insight into the case in a way that will satiate our culture’s true-crime addiction for evidence, but rather it seems to be acting like a jumping-off point for some hypothetical characterizations and psychological profiling of a most gruesome kind – maybe a bit too bare-faced in its methods, but brazen all the same.

Come for the always-dependable realism of a Chloë Sevigny performance; stay for the insidious assertions of what people will do for their shot at public adoration.

Leave your thoughts on this The Girl from Plainville Season 1 Episode 1 review and this episode of The Girl from Plainville below in the comments section. Readers seeking more South By Southwest Film Festival news can visit our South By Southwest Film Festival Page, our Film Festival Page, and our Film Festival Facebook Page. Readers seeking more TV show reviews can visit our TV Show Review Page, our TV Show Review Twitter Page, our TV Show Review Facebook Page, and our TV Show Review Pinterest Page. Want up-to-the-minute notification? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Flipboard.