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. ( 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. The Act, though, runs into the same problem Dannemora did: a story that’s ultimately not capable of sustaining around eight hours of television. Both actors are terrific, but King is more likely the one people will be talking about after. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. For more stories like this, including celebrity news, beauty and fashion advice, savvy political commentary, and fascinating features. 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. And that’s all well before we get to the violent events that inspire the series’ framing device.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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