This series wasn't necessary. A documentary would have sufficed. However, I adore Chloe Sevigny. So I kept watching. If it wasn't for her I would have never made it to the end.
Add a Review
-
nathan-p-hart4 May 2022
-
MrOPositive10 May 2022This series had a lot of filler. Which is tough considering it's only 8 episodes long. Assuming it even had to exist, it should've been 4 at best, but for some reason I stuck in there. Chloe Sevigny is so good as the mom. And I appreciated the way they brought to life Conrad's texts with Michelle, and his own mental health. Those are the backbone of a show that's honestly too generous to Michelle.
So I awaited the grand finale, when they would finally give their take on that phone call. That last phone call where a misguided and scared and hurting Conrad, turns to his "friend" Michelle for help and she tells him to get back into that car and die. It's the foundation of the story. It's "The Crime" at the heart of this true crime story.
And what do we get? An imaginary future, where Michelle and Conrad never became text buddies and meet up in college to see that her social problems (chasing flaky friends, repressed non-heterosexuality, main character syndrome) haven't quite gone away. But he's alive and she's free and only if only she hadn't accidentally guided him to killing himself.
The phone call takes place in slow motion at a distance, from the perspective of a Michelle who knows better now and is screaming for Conrad not to listen to confused young misguiding Michelle! Can it be revisionist history if the only revision is perspective? If the only new take is that the old take was a bit much?
It's only then that you realize, this series isn't about telling the truth of what happened, even bent towards Michelle or Conrad's side. It's about telling us to take it easy on a 17 year old child who didn't know she shouldn't do that. And my what a promising future she'd have if she only just didn't tell her suicidal friend, who's suicide she'd been goading for months, to grow a pair and finish the job of killing himself.
Awful. Disingenuous. Problematic.
I think this series wanted to say that the crimes of youth cast a shadow with age. But that shadow is accountability. And that the events of young and hormonal twist and warp with insight and experience. But actions have consequences is obvious to true crime.
We get it that Michelle had social issues. Girl from Plainville asks us to remember that she's just an innocent girl who made a mistake and she's sorry. But before you tell us that story, why don't you actually show us what she's supposed to be sorry for? Instead of pulling the punch so much, that you even insert a moment of the prosecutor feeling so bad for Michelle right before summary judgment.
Girl From Plainville is if Affluenza was a miniseries.
The HBO documentary on it is so much better.