How ‘The Affair’ Influenced the Natalia Grace Adaptation

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers about Good American Family Episode 3, “Ghosts Everywhere.”]

Good American Family gets very dark on Wednesday’s (March 26) new episode as the veil of perfection put on by Kristine Barnett (Ellen Pompeo) starts to fall and the show’s conceit of subtly (and then not-so-subtly) presenting dual perspectives of the well-known true-crime tale comes into clearer view.

In the episode, Kristine furiously gathers new evidence to support her suspicions that Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid) is a fully grown woman masquerading as a child and is thus a danger to her family. First, she finds socks covered in blood hidden in Natalia’s closet, and later, during a local TV news interview, she spots a bloodied tampon on the living room floor. The family’s primary care doctor, who lives in regret of his initial diagnosis of their oldest child and thus buys Kristine’s every word, suggests a battery of specialists to consult, and Kristine finds new disciplinary exercises online that she uses with Natalia. When she’s invited to New York for an interview, Kristine seizes the opportunity to hunt down Natalia’s nearby former adoptive mother with questions.

By contrast, Michael (Mark Duplass) tries a therapeutic approach offered by one of the specialists to treat Natalia like a baby and show her that love can be trusted. However, even if he has the moral high ground, he’s out of a job now, and he’s been lying about it, too. So by the time the Barnetts are waiting in the green room for their national TV debut, tensions are ready to boil over, and the two engage in a very ugly war of words. With Michael threatening to reveal Kristine’s mistreatment of Natalia and Kristine threatening to put Michael in the poor hour, the two decide to emerge and front as a unified “Good American Family,” fully knowing their fakery.

At this point in the story, we as viewers are still meant to be on the Barnetts’ side of the matter because the events are framed as alleged by them, so everything Kristine does seems logical and even necessary, even if they aren’t perfect. (There’s a timely namecheck of the horror movie that this story reminds everyone of when The Orphan comes up in conversation with Kristine for extra rationalization of her suspicions.) However, Good American Family is painting a much fuller picture than that, even if you can’t quiet see it yet.

Episodes 5 through 8 will completely shift perspectives to show events from Natalia’s point of view, which gives new light to even the first four episodes’ scenes. It’s got a similar effect that might remind fans of The Affair, and for good reason: It’s created and written by the creatives behind that decorated Showtime drama. One such is Sarah Sutherland, whom TV Insider caught up with to break down the big events of this episode and to dig into the finer details.

It’s really interesting how many things you’re able to squeeze into that runtime and really make it so that people can understand all the elements here. In general, how hard was it for you to piece together all those disparate parts of the story?

Sarah Sutherland: Yeah, well, thank you, and thanks for being interested in it. We really love it. It was challenging. And like you’re saying, a big part of the challenge is because it was a real story, and there are so many returns to the real story, there’s actually more material than you can do in a TV show. And so we had a really extensive research process that was instrumental in the writing process. So we had somebody actually on the ground in Indiana during the trials. And the challenge for us as the writers was trying to take a look at all of that, to really sit with all of the material, and try to figure out what’s the story here, what’s the sort of emotional truth? … Taking this crazy, specific family drama that actually unfolded and finding something that’s universal there that can actually hold and sustain and make good use of the whole series, it was that was a big part of the challenge.

When I watched it, I didn’t know you were the writer, but the first impression I got was, “Wow, this reminds me of The Affair” because of the way that the perspective switches and how things are just a little bit different depending on perspective. What made that narrative style right for this story? 

Yeah, well, so Katie Robbins, who created it, and we coshowrun together — we actually met on The Affair, and I take that as a huge compliment that you were able to spot that. Actually my favorite thing about her vision for the project before I got on board was this perspective element… Back when she first started the project — it was in 2020, so there was a lot less known about the story, there wasn’t a documentary, those trials hadn’t even happened — what she realized was that everybody, all the articles, actually had fairly different perspectives on what happened. And so you’d read one, and, “Oh, this is the story.” And then you’d read another, and suddenly, it was that. And so she had this idea to sort of to use the Rashomon-style perspective to explore that and to let the audience, on a meta level, experience those same questions that she experienced when she first came to know the story.

So, I mean, The Affair was such a wonderful writing experience. It was in that wonderful time in television history where we got to spend a lot of time diving into the marriage, and so we brought both in terms of how to bring these characters to life and make them feel real. A lot of our skill set that we developed on The Affair came in handy on this one.

Digging into this episode, there’s a kind of meta wink to The Orphan that came into play. Can you talk about throwing that in and how you managed to make it an afterthought but also very poignant?

Yes, right. So the movie Orphan came out before the story that Kristine and Michael started telling people, and so we weren’t there. We can’t say for sure how it affected their telling of the story, but there are a lot of weird similarities, and we wanted to nod to that without making assumptions that we can’t possibly make.

Yeah, speaking of creative input here, the character Detective Drysdale is obviously based on an amalgamation of characters. But do you know if that call that Michael got from him was based on facts — that maybe he was participating in this and kind of got blindsided?

Yes. So that call, it’s not verbatim, the actual call, but it’s very similar. And so yes, he was, in fact, brought in, and that storyline is a dramatization of real events, but it does hew quite close.

For the performance element, when you’re writing these scripts, there are some moments that kind of play to both sides in this episode, in the doctor’s office scenes in particular. You could view Natalia’s outbursts as those of a child or sociopath. How did you go about writing that and making sure that it could be perceived both ways?

Yeah, that was one of the things that we talked the most about because these first four episodes are really laying the breadcrumbs for what’s to come… The challenge is, how do we get the audience to really relate to the Barnetts when they’re in this experience so that they can go on that journey, while also nodding to the people that are watching, who know a ton about the real-life story that we’re not off our rocker? We’ve done our research. We actually know what happened here.

It was really challenging, and a conversation we had with everybody — with the actors and the directors — [was], “How do we land this tone?” The tone was kind of the key to it. Katie used this phrase, “Landing the tone of the show was like landing on the head of a pin.” Because it’s campy in some ways. It’s intentionally campy because this is a stylized version of events that is told from the Barnetts’ perspective, and some of the fun is the campiness, and I think the actors just really toed that line so beautifully, and our directors as well. Some of the idea is also a little bit to wink to the audience, of like, “Yeah, does she sound maybe a little bit too confident in that, a little bit too sweet?” Or maybe that doesn’t actually — you get to see, even in her perspective, there’s some storytelling that doesn’t quite line up. But then, at the same time, this is a very serious story, and so that challenge was really a big part of how to do what you’re saying.

There’s a parallel in this episode with Michael, in that he seems eager to do what the therapist suggests with this like reattachment therapy, and then later, he’s trying to talk his boss into not liquidating the store. Can you talk about paralleling the futility of this man in this moment?

In terms of thinking about their marriage and the dynamic between the two of them, between Kristine and Michael, we were always saying that Michael is someone who leads with denial. So when faced with something scary, he’ll deny, deny, deny, deny until it’s too late, even when it’s smacking him in the face. Whereas Kristine is the opposite. She sees ghosts everywhere — it’s actually a thing that he says to her, and it’s an echo of something that Almeida, her mother, had said to her. And it definitely stems from her childhood, which you’ll learn a little bit more about in Episode 4. But yeah, so his denial in terms of his job, it’s definitely meant to be thematic and related to the way that he’s denying things that he’s seeing when it comes to Natalia.

Moving on to the home news interview, that’s one of the creepiest moments of the show writ large. But when Natalia is explaining to Michael that she’s having her period, there’s a moment where it seems she’s being forced to say this by Kristine, especially if you’ve seen the second half of the show already. Did you try and sprinkle in little Easter eggs so that on a second watch it would read differently?

Yes. And thank you so much for watching it more than once so that you can appreciate that. Yeah, the Easter eggs were some of the most fun elements. Really also a huge part of the editing process is how to toe that line, because our actors are all so incredible and were regularly giving various different ranges of performances in terms like how much camp or how much to lean toward monster… So it was a matter of very, very long discussions about making sure that that is calibrated in a certain way. And the hope is that on a first watch, you wouldn’t necessarily know. Because for the [first four episodes], you want to be on Kristine and Michael’s side, you want to be with them, with what they’re experiencing. And yet… It really makes me happy to hear that you see on a second watch, there’s a lot of little moments of, “Oh, wait a minute.”

During the punishment scene, Kristine takes a video of Natalia. I know you said you had a lot of access, a lot of research. Did you guys actually see those recordings?

… Nothing in the show is a perfect recreation of things, but there we did have a lot of home videos that were related to these kinds of interactions that helped us understand sort of the tone and the reality of that time where Natalia was a problem that they didn’t know how to handle.

Disney / Ser Baffo

There’s a moment when Jacob essentially tells Kristine that he doesn’t like how she acts in front of a camera and she’s faking it. And at first, she seems really shocked and upset, but then at the end of the episode, she completely embraces it. Can you talk about writing that about-face of this character?

Yeah. So a really interesting storyline within this show is Kristine’s growing fame and also the relationship that she has with Jake. I mean, she says to him in the pilot episode that he is her favorite person to talk to. On one hand, that seems really wonderful, and on the other hand, there’s another way of looking at that. So yeah, that’s just a good example of a storyline where we wanted to have there be sort of two different interpretations of it.

The episode ends with Kristine and Michael having an ending argument in the dressing room where they open up the door on her childhood and the job loss. Can you talk about crafting that scene of them basically making a suicide pact and agreeing that they’re over, but they’re going to put on a brave face?

Yeah, that’s actually one of my favorite scenes that we shot just because I love marriage fights. I loved writing it. And with any script, we did a bunch of different versions, and Katie and I talked endlessly about it, because I think we’ve [done] The Affair, because we always have loved just those rich character moments where both people are right, but both people are handling the fact that they think they’re right, so terribly wrong. And it was actually Katie’s idea to have Michael basically blackmail her. I loved the scene before then, but when she said that, it felt like the scene just opened up into this whole new thing, and it gave Mark such an exciting thing because Michael is always playing the beta to Kristine. And this was the one moment where he was able to really use her script back on her and see how she handled it. And I love every take of that. I mean, there could be five different versions of that scene, but they did such an incredible job. And Ellen and Mark are incredible to work with, and seeing them together in that was really — that was one of my favorite moments on set because they just like to fight. They’re really good at pretend fighting.

Good American Family, Wednesdays, Hulu