NEW YORK (AP) — If Ellen Pompeo was going to discover a new position after 20 years as a sequence common on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” it needed to be good. She thinks she discovered it as a supermom whose world collapses in Hulu’s “Good American Family.”
“I was looking for a real creative challenge. I think this was an opportunity for me to completely disappear into a role,″ she says. ”Characters like this don’t come alongside all that usually.”
“Good American Family” fictionalizes the true story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian-born orphan with dwarfism, adopted as a baby by an American household who quickly accuse her of being a troubled grownup masquerading as a baby.
Pompeo performs the adoptive mom, whose character has grow to be a sought-after speaker and writer after elevating a son with autism however now finds herself at her breaking level with Natalia, her marriage strained, in authorized jeopardy and her repute in tatters.
“We were taking all of this research that we had and amplifying certain moments or adjusting certain moments for kind of dramatic license,” says creator and co-showrunner Katie Robbins, who also created “Sunny” and wrote for “The Affair.”
“The factor that was vital was to inform a propulsive, compulsively watchable factor. However, on the finish of the day, a very powerful factor was to inform it in an emotionally genuine method to the individuals concerned.”
Over time, the case has been the main target of a number of TV exhibits, podcasts and documentaries, together with Investigation Discovery’s documentary sequence “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.”
If viewers hope to get readability on who the heroes are, they will not get it with “Good American Family.” It tells the story from a number of factors of view, flashing ahead and again, to create a posh household drama that additionally has parts of a thriller.
“You really have to pay attention to who’s doing the telling,” says Robbins. “Using perspective felt like an opportunity both to tell the story in kind of a fresh way, but also to allow us as storytellers to take the viewers on an experience that would help them confront their own biases in unexpected ways.”
The sequence begins from the angle of the adoptive mother and father — Mark Duplass performs the husband — who ultimately activate their new member of the family, however then shifts to Natalia (performed by Imogen Religion Reid), slowly cracking any snap judgements the viewer could have had going into it.
“Everybody comes into the experience of this story with sort of a different way of looking at it,” says co-showrunner and government producer Sarah Sutherland. “It’s sort of like a Rorschach test. I just thought it was super-fascinating to sit with the kind of uncomfortableness of that.”
The eight episodes that start debuting Wednesday seamlessly mix darkness and lightweight, displaying moments of household levity but additionally scenes of terror, as when Natalia approaches her mother and father’ mattress with a knife.
“In terms of the tone, I am a firm believer that life is a real genre blend,” says Robbins. “The happiest moments in my life have been undercut often with tragedy, and the saddest moments I’ve often found myself finding something absurdly hilarious. So everything that I write, I try to let all live in that sort of tension because that’s what it is to be a person.”
At its core, “Good American Family” is about how we’re raised and the way that may echo by generations. We find out how Pompeo’s character was handled by her mom and the way Natalia wasn’t all the time raised with familial love, priming them for a face-off.
“We’re examining the ways in which one is parented trickles down and affects the way that one is a parent,” says Robbins. “It changes the way that you perceive the world. And I think that it’s a fascinating thing that runs through the arc of this series.”
Pompeo sees a fair bigger level — how everybody nowadays has their very own definitive model of occasions and sees issues although their very own lens.
“Even if you know you’re wrong, it takes an extraordinary amount of humility to admit you’re wrong. It’s so much easier to just go with it, stick to the ego and say, ‘I wasn’t wrong,’” she says.
“We see that with what’s occurring in our nation proper now. Individuals will combat to the dying earlier than they admit they had been unsuitable. It doesn’t matter what we see, proper?” she provides.
“We’re seeing things before our eyes, and people are saying something else, and we’re choosing to believe what was said instead of what we’re seeing. And that is the human condition.”
