Or maybe it’s America itself that lacks delicacy, and the series, taking its excesses as its subject, is just responding with commensurate force. “The Act” sketches its themes with a heavy hand. Her eyes-framed by oversized glasses that play up her kitsch-urchin Keane-painting look-cloud with confusion, fire with resentment, and moon with desire for freedom. Before long, the child begins to question whether she is, in fact, a child.
The child is not as sickly as the world-and she herself-has been led to believe. But Dee Dee is running a scam, and she is running a prison. In Dee Dee’s accounting, Gypsy suffers from epilepsy, paraplegia, heart murmurs, anemia, and significant developmental delays. Arquette’s voice is an overripe Louisiana drawl-the Blanchards’ displacement by Hurricane Katrina is a convenient excuse for their missing paperwork and an easy prod for further pity from others-and there’s a generous dash of Blanche DuBois in Dee Dee’s wanton maundering and her dependence on the kindness of strangers. The action shifts back, seven years earlier, to a scene of Dee Dee and Gypsy skillfully delivering their own human-interest story to a local-news camera crew, shortly after moving onto their cozy cul-de-sac, into a house built by Habitat for Humanity volunteers. The action begins, in 2015, with a concerned neighbor climbing through a window of the little pink house and encountering a hoard of kitsch: mounds of stuffed animals, given to Gypsy by strangers who were moved by the plight of a sick child.
It’s more a ready-made parable of toxic parenthood or a mass-cultural case study than a thriller. The virtues of “The Act” are often distinct from the details of its dramatic arc. To know that the title of the article was “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered” is not to have the plot of the series spoiled.
By the end of the first episode, a yellow barricade of police tape further cordons off the building-an “American Gothic” showpiece.Ĭreated by Michelle Dean and Nick Antosca, “The Act” adapts Dean’s 2016 true-crime story about the Blanchards into a semi-fictional exploration of emotional truths. Posts on the ramp’s railing evoke a white-picket fence from one angle and a fortified barrier from most others. Its owner, Dee Dee Blanchard (Patricia Arquette), brings her daughter, Gypsy Rose (Joey King), into the little pink house by pushing the girl, in a wheelchair, up a ramp. It’s a bungalow with a Pepto-Bismol tint. The central setting of “The Act,” now on Hulu, is a humble home in Springfield, Missouri.
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