Like countless prestige series before it, The Act begins with a fatal mystery. Is Dee Dee Blanchard, whom we haven’t seen yet, dead, as her neighbors (AnnaSophia Robb and Chloë Sevigny) believe she is? Has her sick daughter Gypsy Rose really been abducted? The trick of the eight-part series is figuring out the answers to these questions, and what could have led these women to such terrible fates. Especially since the Blanchards appear to be living a beautiful, loving life when we meet them in the second scene of the series, which takes place seven years before the foreboding cold open.