The Girl From Plainville

"The Girl From Plainville": Everything to know about the Michelle Carter texting suicide series on Hulu starring Elle Fanning.

With that in mind, Hannah and McManus do a serviceable job at bringing the texting suicide case to the small screen. The couple hopes that the passage of such a law would act as a deterrent to similar situations in the future. In texts to her friends following Conrad’s death, Carter used lines from an episode of “Glee” that aired after actor Cory Monteith died of a drug overdose. “If you are trying to find a sense of self, is that the right place to do it?” Before each episode, Hulu added a disclaimer that parts of the show “have been fictionalized solely for dramatic purposes and are not intended to reflect on any actual person or entity.” Most of the scenes that are easily identifiable as fictionalized clearly serve a narrative purpose. So why does the world need a show like “The Girl From Plainville”? Ryan told The Boston Herald that after filming the series, he was left convinced that society needs to do a better job helping young people understand that there is life outside their online and electronic interactions. But Moniz said that Carter telling Roy to get back in his truck shortly before he took his own life and Carter not alerting authorities of his actions were criminal acts, with Moniz stating that Carter “recklessly goaded her boyfriend into suicide with a series of phone calls and texts, and then failed to help him.” In opening arguments, Bristol Assistant District Attorney Maryclare Flynn shared text messages Carter sent to Roy’s mother, saying that the texts showed Carter attempting to hide her role in Roy’s death. At the heart of the case was whether text messages and phone calls were sufficient cause for manslaughter charges. “I think the media definitely showed a very one-dimensional view of this case on both sides.

A review of 'The Girl From Plainville,' the Hulu limited series that stars Elle Fanning as Michelle Carter, the young woman at the center of the teen ...

All of the series directors, including Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) and Hannah, gracefully slide in and out of those more imaginative, slightly chilling sequences in a way that is seamless. Ultimately, this series has to settle for the fact that all it can tell us is exactly what happened when the real mystery, still, is what made Michelle Carter tick. 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. As a high-schooler who is included but not necessarily embraced by her peers, Fanning’s Michelle comes across as vulnerable and insecure with many of her girlfriends but fixated and disturbed in more private moments. One of the challenges facing the series is that so much of the relationship between Michelle and Conrad played out via text messages, which could have been more conventionally illustrated by watching Fanning and Ryan thumb their phones from separate locations. Like the previously cited examples, The Girl From Plainville is based on a true story, the so-called texting-suicide case in which Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to take his own life.

The strange case of Michelle Carter turns out to have been better suited to a documentary than a drama, as "The Girl From Plainville" -- Hulu's stark, ...

That's through no fault of the stars. More sober than made-for-Lifetime underpinnings, the fights of fancy and what-ifs in the presentation don't entirely work, however well intended. They grapple with that digital divide by depicting many of their text exchanges as what amount to in-person conversations, an understandable dramatic device that nevertheless feels as if it blurs the contours of the relationship.

Elle Fanning and Colton Ryan are the heart and soul of an otherwise rocky true-crime series.

However, 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. The show attempts to discern these elements with endless zoom-in shots of Fanning vigorously crying or running on the treadmill. 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. And for the most part, this is because of rousing performances by Fanning, Ryan, and Chloë Sevigny (who plays Conrad’s mother, Lynn Roy). The show is based on the infamous “texting-suicide” case and Carter’s trial for involuntary manslaughter after Conrad Roy died in 2014. It’s a sad and disturbing moment and an effective representation of what Hulu’s limited series does best—that is, rigorously explore of the mental health of the two troubled teens at its core.