Just months after playing a heavily accented woman enticed to commit crimes by her tragic pathologies in “Escape at Dannemora,” Patricia Arquette is doing the same thing — just with a different accent, different crimes, and different pathologies — in the new Hulu original “The Act.” Both Showtime’s prison-break drama from last year and Hulu’s newer offering have similar mandates, spending the length of a season looking into a single crime story and excavating from it insights about character. And there’s plenty of character in this story, about a mother whose apparent Munchausen by proxy keeps her daughter a prisoner and eventually engenders bloody revenge. Arquette’s vivid performance in particular leans deliciously far into the show’s general lack of insight or commentary about the crime it depicts. “The Act,” contrary to a general trend of finding the nourishing nugget at the center of famous scandal, has little to say but a general expression of wonderment at quite how strange a place the world can be. The lack of didacticism — and the show’s commitment to representing a story with relative fealty to how it occurred and willingness to push past boundaries of taste — comes as a sort of relief. Arquette’s Dee Dee Blanchard helps her daughter Gypsy (Joey King) through all sorts of ailments, ones Dee Dee seems to stop just short of enjoying for how they make her presence necessary. But no one in her life asks too many questions: Gypsy’s father is out of the picture, and her bald head and feeding tube seem like a potent enough signal that her health is poor. After the pair relocate to Missouri, Gypsy’s desire to experience life outside of her mother’s protective gaze — and her sense that she actually does have enough vigor to live something closer to a normal life than her cloistered upbringing — push mother and daughter closer and closer to conflagration. The details of “The Act” will be known to many — the story has already been the subject of an HBO documentary and a widely-read BuzzFeed News article, whose author executive produces “The Act.” And yet the approach, here, is engagingly lurid, engaging with the remarkable oddity and pain of the story rather than reaching to make points that the story doesn’t serve. Other entries in what’s become an increasingly robust genre of season-long re-enactments of recent history — from “Dannemora” to FX’s two “American Crime Stories” — make, with varying degrees of success, big points about society. Here, instead, we get Patricia Arquette decompensating in the juiciest of ways, asking for her “sleepy baby” pills as she tells her pet guinea pig, “I’m your mama now”; her willingness to be deeply weird feels more welcome than ever. And King lends shading and complexity to a young woman who’s evidently learned that smiling stoically is the only way to get what she wants from a mother who romanticizes her ailments. As Gypsy, she comes most truly alive when out of her mother’s eyeline, a process of awakening that’s both tragic, given how far Gypsy is from real empowerment, and quietly thrilling. Her performance helps answer the question of why the show exists (a real one, when it comes to the depiction and dredging up of human suffering): King is bringing soul and life to a young woman whose story seems beyond our comprehension. “The Act’s” tendency to lean into its inherent drama does mean that certain points get made over and over; because there’s no real modulation of tone, we see, for instance, Arquette sharing ironic truisms about the meaning of motherhood with neighbor Chloë Sevigny one too many times. But generally, “The Act” nails what it’s going for — a grotty, nasty, poisonous fable whose punch comes from the fact that some version of it really happened but that would be compelling regardless. The series’s best shots are exteriors of the home where Gypsy and Dee Dee torment one another, shot from below so as to appear looming and menacing and, later, from above, so as to resemble a dollhouse whose inhabitants are guided by some force beyond their understanding. They’re shots a conventionally better show wouldn’t include: Too proudly goofy, too baroque. On this slice of American oddity, though, they end up feeling right. “The Act.” Hulu. March 20. Eight episodes (five screened for review). Cast: Patricia Arquette, Joey King, Chloë Sevigny, AnnaSophia Robb, Calum Worthy. Executive Producers: Nick Antosca, Michelle Dean, Greg Shephard, Britton Rizzio.<doc-sep>Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episodes of the week for March 17 through 23 are “La Maison du Bon Rêve” and “Teeth,” the first two episodes of Hulu’s The Act. The chief storytelling advantage that TV has over most other narrative forms is time. Its stories can unfold over years, in something approaching real time, and it effectively controls how you experience that passage of time, even if you’re marathoning an entire series over the course of a week or three. A movie is always finite, and you control how fast you read a novel. But a long-running TV show can almost feel like inviting a new friend into your life for a while, then watching as they grow and change. But time has also become something of an enemy of TV in the streaming era. Throw a dart at your Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon home screen and you’ll find a series that ran for 10 episodes but should have only been six, or a series that ran for six episodes but should have been a two-hour movie. While there are still plenty of shows that use all of their time well, in this wild new TV world they seem fewer and farther between. For a while, I wondered if Hulu’s The Act was another series with too much time and not enough story to tell. The true-crime limited series, which is adapting Michelle Dean’s 2016 BuzzFeed article about the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard (Dean is co-creator with Channel Zero’s Nick Antosca), will unspool over eight episodes. I’ve seen five of those episodes, and though I’ll be discussing only the first two in this article, I’ll warn you that by episodes four and five, it’s easy to worry that the show is running out of story. And yet at the same time, The Act’s languorous rhythms become a perverse attraction. It opens the front door to a house where a very toxic relationship is unfolding, then asks you to step in and sit for a while. Whether you accept that invitation is up to you. Hulu: Home of the binge series as dare The series The Act most reminds me of is The Handmaid’s Tale, not just because both series are on Hulu but because both series have ultra-intimate focuses that all but dare you to sit and watch them in a marathon session. How much misery in Gilead can you put up with? For me, a couple of hours at a time, but I know people who binged the entire series so far over a long, horrifying weekend. The Act may prove a similar endurance challenge. At the core of the series is a warped and deeply broken mother-daughter relationship. Dee Dee (Patricia Arquette) deeply loves her daughter, Gypsy Rose (Joey King), but Gypsy is very, very sick, and Dee Dee has sacrificed or abandoned everything about herself that isn’t caring for Gypsy’s every need. Yet if you were to open Dee Dee’s medicine cabinet and examine the pill bottles containing the medication she dispenses to Gypsy to treat the girl’s many ailments, you’d start to suspect something’s not right. Some of the bottles are labeled “Sleepy Baby,” and even a child as sick as Gypsy is wouldn’t require row after row after row after row of pills. What’s more, Gypsy is beginning to question the things her mother has told her. If she’s allergic to sugar, as Dee Dee insists, then why can she eat whipped cream? And why is she confined to a wheelchair if she is able to walk so easily? To its credit, The Act doesn’t hide that Gypsy isn’t actually sick and that Dee Dee is creating these ailments for reasons impossible to explain, as anyone who’s familiar with the original BuzzFeed story — or with HBO’s true-crime documentary about Dee Dee and Gypsy, Mommy Dead and Dearest — will recall. Whether or not they know the basics of the Blanchards’ real-life tale, fans of HBO’s Sharp Objects and the Mischa Barton scene in The Sixth Sense will recognize that it’s Dee Dee, and not Gypsy, who is afflicted — with the psychological disorder Munchausen syndrome by proxy, wherein a caretaker ensures that someone in their care remains sick and vulnerable, when they would otherwise be able to care for themselves. And Gypsy could very much care for herself. What’s more, the series doesn’t hide that something terrible happens to Dee Dee in its first two hours, opening with neighbors alerting authorities to the Blanchard house, where Dee Dee’s corpse turns out to be lying facedown in her bed. Something horrible unfolded here, and as the show flashes between the police investigation of the murder and a point a few years prior when Dee Dee and Gypsy befriend some new neighbors, it begins to close that noose a little more tightly. But as with The Handmaid’s Tale, the question you might find yourself asking while watching The Act is whether you really want to be in that house, watching as Dee Dee uses what control she has over Gypsy to keep the girl from living her own life. King, who is terrific, speaks in a high-pitched near-squeal, so Gypsy constantly seems vulnerable, allowing Dee Dee to better obfuscate everything about her daughter, from Gypsy’s physical well-being to even her age. And Arquette, who knows a thing or two about playing women driven by some unexplained dark urge within themselves (having played such a character just a few months ago in Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora) is so good at nailing the moment during every doctor’s visit, during every stopover at a friend’s house, during every social encounter, in which Dee Dee flips the power dynamic on a dime and demands that Gypsy re-surrender to her control before others catch on to what’s happening. The direction of The Act’s first two episodes (by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre) only underlines this suffocation.<doc-sep>The mystery surrounding Dee Dee and Gypsy deepens in episode three of The Act. Gypsy tries to lead a secret life behind her mother’s back, but that proves to be tougher than she thought. The Act — “Two Wolverines” – Episode 103 — Dee Dee makes Gypsy play dress up for a costume convention, where they each attract charming men who could dangerously complicate their insular relationship. And Gypsy is starting to question the lies her mother tells her — especially about how old she really is. Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Joey King) and Dee Dee Blanchard (Patricia Arquette), shown. (Photo by: Brownie Harris/Hulu) This episode of The Act opens in 2011 for the first time. Dee Dee reads letters from supporters of Gypsy. They’ve sent money to help Gypsy and her mom. Dee Dee collects the money, barely taking the time to read the letters. At night, we see that Gypsy is still sneaking off in the middle of the night to watch videos online (we see her watching a video on how to kiss). Gypsy also logs into Facebook where she checks out a video for an upcoming comic convention. She starts to do research on possible cosplays. The Act shifts to Gypsy dressed up in a Beauty and the Beast Belle costume. She’s also doing her mom’s makeup (claiming she learned by practicing on a doll and not from watching videos online). After Dee Dee’s makeup is done, she tells Gypsy to change into her Cinderella costume—Dee Dee claims she must have shrunk the Belle costume. Gypsy is clearly disappointed. At the convention, Dee Dee tries to get Gypsy in as a “child,” saying she was born in 1995 and is 15. The cutoff is 12 for children’s admission prices, but the ticket seller is nice and lets it slide. As they walk away, Gypsy is confused, since Dee Dee had previously said she was born in 1993 (making her 17 going on 18–which, you know, seems like an important distinction). Dee Dee blames the mixup on a car accident and says 1995 is the correct year. Gypsy moves on and is taken by all the costumes and attendees at the convention. Gypsy says she loves how nice everyone is to her at conventions. The two come across Shelley and start chatting. Before long, a man (Russ) dressed as Logan/Wolverine comes up and starts talking to them. Shelley takes the hint and wheels Gypsy away so Russ can talk more directly to Dee Dee. He tries to flirt with her, but she’s reluctant to talk about herself, instead of talking about Gypsy and Gypsy’s interests. She seems completely clueless about his intentions. Eventually, Dee Dee awkwardly excuses herself to go to the bathroom, leaving Gypsy with Shelley and Russ with…himself. Of course, as soon as Dee Dee walks off, Shelley has to go with her boyfriend (who had accidentally made a kid cry) and Gypsy is left alone. Gypsy says she’ll stay where she is, but instead, she starts wheeling herself around the convention. Seeing a different man dressed as Wolverine, she adjusts her costume (tightens the strings around her waist, pulls the top of the dress down over her shoulders) before going up to the booth where he’s shopping. She introduces herself to Wolverine (aka Scott). They talk about comics, she’s clearly into him and he (who is seemingly much older) is nice. The combination of Gypsy’s behavior (thanks to Dee Dee not letting her grow up) and her costume makes it tough for anyone to really figure out how old she is, Scott included. Scott asks her age and Gypsy says she’s 18. The Act cuts to the bathroom where Dee Dee overhears two women talking about meeting men. After they leave, she takes a paper towel and starts wiping the makeup off of her face. Gypsy and Scott walk and he tells her about Wolverine and Jean Grey (which Gypsy didn’t know anything about before now). Gypsy then calls Scott the most honorable man she’s ever met. He responds by calling her the sweetest Cinderella he’s met. Just then, Gypsy spots a DeLorean from Back to the Future and tells Scott they have to go over. As they get in line, the photographer asks if they’d like to jump to the front of the line. Gypsy reluctantly agrees. As they get to the front, Scott scoops her up to put her in the front seat of the DeLorean. They take a picture together. The camera flash transitions The Act back to the future (get it? see what I did there?) where detectives are still searching Dee Dee’s house. Shelley, Mel, and Lacey stand on Mel’s porch talking. As they talk, Shelley starts to recall fuzzy details about a time four years ago when Dee Dee called her in the middle of the night, frantic about some man—she needed to find out the man’s name. Mel can’t believe Shelley didn’t ask more about it, but Shelley shoots back that she and Dee Dee weren’t as close as Mel and Dee Dee used to be. Annoyed at Mel’s frustration with her, Shelley gets up to leave. In the end, Shelley can’t remember the name of the man or the precise reason Dee Dee wanted his name. Back in 2011, Dee Dee rejoins the crowd and finds Shelley. She gets frantic when Gypsy isn’t there and Shelley says Gypsy is with “Wolverine.” Dee Dee clearly thinks she means the Wolverine who tried to flirt with her and she goes off to find her daughter. Once Dee Dee catches up with Gypsy and meets Scott, she pulls Gypsy’s costume back up to cover her shoulders and tells her to say goodbye to Scott (despite Gypsy wanting to stay for a costume contest). Before they can leave, Russ comes over and asks to talk to Dee Dee again. As they say goodbye, Scott says they can still be friends. However, he’s a bit thrown when Gypsy says that she and her mom share a Facebook account, even though she’s “18.” Despite this, she asks for his Facebook information.<doc-sep>It’s a cliché in crime stories both true and fictional that neighbors and loved ones are blindsided to learn what the people close to them were truly capable of doing. But in the case of Dee Dee Blanchard and her daughter Gypsy Rose — the central figures of the first season of Hulu’s new true-crime anthology series The Act — it would be hard to blame anyone for missing what was really going on. It’s impossible to discuss the series (the first two episodes premiere March 20th, with the remaining six debuting weekly; I’ve seen the first five hours) without getting into some of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose’s secret. But since the series is based on a wildly popular BuzzFeed article — its author, Michelle Dean, co-created the series with Nick Antosca — and the Blanchards’ story was also told in an HBO documentary (Mommy Dead and Dearest), I feel safe in “spoiling” some of this true tale. Dee Dee (Patricia Arquette) is overworked single mother to Gypsy Rose (Joey King), a wheelchair-bound, bald, chronically-ill teenage girl who speaks in a squeaky voice and, according to Dee Dee, has the mental capacity of a seven-year-old. The story bounces around in time between the 2015 discovery of a body in the Blanchard home and mother and daughter’s arrival several years earlier at that house, which was built for them through Habitat for Humanity after they lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. Their new neighbor Mel (Chloë Sevigny) senses something not quite right in their story, but Gypsy Rose is so clearly sick, and just as sweet, that Mel and her friends welcome them into the community. Soon, though, it becomes clear to the viewer that Gypsy Rose isn’t nearly as sick as her mother claims, and a new doctor begins to wonder if this might be a case of Munchausen by proxy, where a parent deliberately makes their child seem ill to feel needed. And that’s all well before we get to the violent events that inspire the series’ framing device. The scripts by Dean and Antosca and the performances by the two leads do a fine job exploring the murky power dynamic between mother and child. Gypsy obviously knows that some — and maybe all — of what she and Dee Dee tell the world about her isn’t true; her reasons for playing along are complicated and tragic. But when she begins an online relationship with a troubled young man (Calum Worthy, even creepier than he was in American Vandal Season One), the abusive codependence becomes more than she can handle. This is Arquette’s second de-glammed true-crime performance in the last few months, following her acclaimed (and probably Emmy front-running) turn as Tilly Mitchell, the prison-employee-turned-accomplice in Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora. Dee Dee is a much richer role than Tilly was — her personality and temperament are more varied, and she’s far better at manipulating people (albeit in stomach-churning ways at times) than Tilly ever hoped to be — but the performance feels less thrilling solely due to the bad timing of coming second on the calendar. Instead, the revelation here is King. She not only undergoes a severe physical metamorphosis but has to wildly shift her persona from one scene to the next, depending who’s watching and how independently minded Gypsy Rose is feeling in that moment. Both actors are terrific, but King is more likely the one people will be talking about after. The Act, though, runs into the same problem Dannemora did: a story that’s ultimately not capable of sustaining around eight hours of television. (Mommy Dead and Dearest clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes.) There are twists and turns to the central relationship and the reason it comes to a violent end, but the story starts to feel repetitive quickly, and the lead performances (and nimble direction by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Adam Arkin and others) can only mask that for so long. After a couple of hours, I couldn’t resist reading the BuzzFeed story, after which my desire to keep watching the series took a major hit. It’s not hard to see why Hulu might want to use this story to launch a new series, nor why Arquette and King might be drawn to these roles. But once the initial secret is revealed, there’s only so much tale to compellingly tell, and The Act lingers well past that point.<doc-sep>
Patricia Arquette and Joey King play a toxic mother-daughter duo headed for disaster in Hulu's scary soap of a limited series. Patricia Arquette is out to single-handedly destroy “Sharp Objects.” Not only did the Oscar-winning actress steer Showtime’s “Escape at Dannemora” to a Golden Globe that could’ve belonged to Amy Adams, but now she’s playing a mentally deranged mother who poisons her daughter in order to keep the abused teen dependent on her. Plus, Arquette’s creepy new Hulu limited series has the benefit of being true — take that, Adora. In all seriousness, “The Act” isn’t much like “Sharp Objects,” in tone or quality. Though Gillian Flynn’s adaptation will face off against both Arquette miniseries at this year’s Emmys, the latest isn’t as meticulously edited, captured, or performed as HBO’s outstanding modern gothic mystery, and it’s not trying to be. While last year’s summer sensation was an addictive, dense slice of cherry pie — with an interwoven lattice topping purposefully shaped for its refined flavors as much as the ornate admiration it attracts — this spring’s offering is a peculiar pastry you can’t stop poking. At times, you just want to know what this thing is, but after a few hours, you’ll be surprised to find how much time you’ve spent enjoying the taste. As chronicled in Erin Lee Carr’s HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” (2017), “The Act” tells the embellished true story of Gypsy Blanchard (Joey King), a young girl living with her mother in a home built for them by Habitat for Humanity. The Louisiana-born mother-daughter duo qualified for the house in Springfield, MO after losing their home and belongings in Katrina, but they earned an extra bit of attention from the media because of Gypsy’s many illnesses. Epilepsy, paraplegia, anemia, and many allergies all plague the bald, big-eyed young woman, who’s wheeled around the house by her attentive mom, Dee Dee (Arquette). As can be expected for a housebound girl with only an overprotective mother for company, Gypsy also suffers from a bit of arrested development. Dee Dee says that’s one of her symptoms, but it quickly becomes clear the parent prefers her child to stay forever young. Gypsy wears wigs and dresses to look like Disney princesses. She doesn’t know anything about sex despite being at least 14 years old (her age is a point of debate in the narrative). She speaks in the sweet, high-pitched voice of a six-year-old who’s just figured out how to get what she wants by playing the cute card. The role is deceptively tricky. King has to play to the extremes of Gypsy’s personality in order to emphasize just how messed up things got in that house, and to exacerbate the situation toward its morbid endpoint. The series begins with a flash-forward to cops discovering Dee Dee’s dead body in the house — how we get there (and what happens to Gypsy) is the central mystery. King has to convince the audience why this kid would take so much abuse from her mom while slowly transitioning to a more active, vengeful place. How is she capable of being coaxed into complacency for so long, and yet also capable of such extreme violence? All the while, King’s got to keep up that voice, which alternates between hilarious and exasperating. Brownie Harris / Hulu She’s the weirdest, most fascinating, and best part of the series. Arquette does a fine job embodying an obsessive, overly protective mother, and her physical embodiment of another decaying, dim authority figure is notably distinct from her “Escape at Dannemora” role (even if their accents do blend together at times). But even when she’s screaming, running, or bending Gypsy to her will, Dee Dee remains somewhat familiar. Gypsy isn’t, and the show smartly spends a lot more time in her twisted perspective. Co-created by Michelle Dean and Nick Antosca (“Channel Zero”), with three episodes helmed by “The Mustang” director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, “The Act” isn’t as formally playful as it could be. Episode titles are superimposed at choice moments (sometimes deep into an episode) to underline their strangeness, and there are a lot of off-kilter close-ups wrapping around Gypsy’s bald head. The combination of subject and sequencing creates an eerie atmosphere, but pushing a bit further stylistically could have made this a campy treat instead of something caught between sincere storytelling and the bizarre true story. Still, after five of the eight total episodes, “The Act” is a satisfying exploration of one girl’s desperate bid for independence.