The Act runs eight episodes on Hulu, and it spends most of them refusing to look away. The biographical crime drama premiered March 20, 2019, built on the life of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Joey King plays Gypsy. Patricia Arquette plays Dee Dee.
Arquette won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards. King was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress. Both honors are earned. Neither is the reason the show stays with you.
Trailer, via Hulu.
A Wheelchair That Was Never Needed
Gypsy uses a wheelchair because of an illness. The illness is not real. Dee Dee spent years convincing her daughter, her family, her friends and her doctors that the child was sick. The show frames the behavior as factitious disorder imposed on another, still commonly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Gypsy grew up believing she had cancer. She did not. The reveal does not land as a twist. It leaks, slowly, into every relationship she has, and the series gives it room to spread.
King plays the discovery in stages. Confusion first. Then vertigo. Then something harder and more useful: the understanding that her mother’s care was a cage with the lock on the inside.
Dee Dee’s Rules
Arquette does not play a monster. She plays a woman with a system. Dee Dee dedicated her life to her daughter’s care, and the show makes clear the dedication and the abuse run on the same fuel.
As Gypsy insists on independence, Dee Dee grows more protective, more controlling, more abusive. The flashpoint is sexuality. Gypsy wants to explore it. Her mother treats that want like a symptom.
The series is smart about how the deception worked. It was not one lie. It was a thousand small ones, told to nurses, neighbors and relatives, each propping up the last. Dee Dee fooled everyone, and the show does not let the audience feel superior for being fooled too.
Nick Godejohn Arrives
The narrative leads to murder. Gypsy asks her boyfriend, Nick Godejohn, to kill her mother. Calum Worthy plays Nick. The show does not romanticize him, and it does not turn the killing into a set piece. It arrives like something that was always going to arrive.
The supporting cast carries the middle stretch. AnnaSophia Robb plays Lacey. Chloë Sevigny plays Mel. Both roles show Gypsy what a normal life might look like from the outside, and both are written with more patience than the genre usually allows.
The weakness is pacing. Eight parts is a long time to spend in a house where the audience already knows the ending. Some episodes circle the same argument twice.
What Kristy Blanchard Said
Not everyone connected to the case was happy with the result. In April 2019, Kristy Blanchard, Gypsy’s stepmother, said she was unhappy with how Aleah Woodmansee was portrayed. Woodmansee’s name is not mentioned in the show. Robb’s character, Lacey, comes from her.
Kristy Blanchard said a scene in the second episode shows Lacey giving Gypsy a cigarette, which did not happen in reality.
She is the total opposite of that. It hurts Aleah because she lives in Springfield, and people are going to look at her differently and she’s scared that it affects her job and reputation.
Woodmansee also objected to Robb’s accent. She called it a twangy choice and said she was not a fan of the whole hillbilly tone.
The Cigarette That Was Invented
This is not a small gripe, and it is not just a family’s hurt feelings. The Act is a true-crime series about real people who are still alive, and its power depends on the audience believing it is telling the truth. When a real person says a scene was invented and her on-screen stand-in was given a voice she never had, that is a crack in the foundation.
The defense would be dramatic license. That defense is weaker here than it would be in fiction. Lacey is not a composite. She is Aleah Woodmansee with a different name and a cigarette she never handed over.
The show is still worth watching. Arquette’s performance is the best argument for it, and King’s is the second. But the series never quite answers the question it raises about its own methods: whose story is this, and who gets to tell it?
The Act understands Dee Dee’s deception better than it understands the people left behind by it. The Emmy for Arquette is fair. The nomination for King is fair. The discomfort of the real people in Springfield is also fair, and the show has no answer for it.
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