Plus: a medical mystery, 'Mean Girls,' and Baldur's Gate 3

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when a puzzling finale aired. It was the week when the least surprising sequel in history was on the way. And it was the week when the Golden Globes were even more "whatever" than usual. (Lots more at the news quiz.) (By the way, I link to it every week, but if you've never tried the NPR news quiz, give it a go. It's really fun and quite witty.) Let's get to it. 'Natalia Grace' and what true crime is for Laura Miller wrote a good piece for Slate about what she called the "dirty tricks" of the Investigation Discovery documentary series The Curious Case of Natalia Grace and its newly released sequel series, Natalia Speaks. As can sometimes happen, her expression of her grave doubts had the unintended effect of making me want to watch the show, and having seen both the original and the follow-up, I want to encourage you not to make my mistake. Whether you watch it as a "guilty pleasure" or for any sort of actual insight, it doesn't work. It's ultimately a trick, where it will persuade you to keep watching in the hopes that it's going to uncover something interesting in addition to its most sensational basic outlines, and then it doesn't. It's very good at that trick, but a trick is all it is. The story of Natalia as presented in the series is long, and Miller covers it well, but the short version is this: as a disabled six-year-old with dwarfism who had been born in Ukraine, she was adopted in 2010 into a family called the Barnetts, led by mother Kristine and father Michael. They immediately began expressing the opinion that she was not six at all, but was an adult masquerading as a child -- and a dangerous, violent one at that. (If this sounds like the horror movie Orphan, some people suspect this is exactly where they got this idea.) After a couple of years, the Barnetts successfully convinced a judge, using limited evidence, that they were right, and the judge legally "re-aged" her. She was re-aged not by a couple of years, but all the way to 22 years old. And then the Barnetts moved her into an apartment and left her there. Investigation Discovery Kristine hasn't spoken for these documentaries, but Michael has -- a lot. And in the follow-up, Natalia (as promised in the title) does too. But much of the narrative explanation that moves the story along comes from Beth Karas, who is credited as a "legal analyst" and is a former attorney who's been specializing in pontificating on television about sensational cases for many years. It's not clear that she has any particular reason to be here, since little of what she says is legal analysis, but the filmmakers seemingly expect her to be an authoritative source who can take audiences through the story. What she seems like instead is just ... somebody who's watching the documentary series just like you are, and telling you what conclusions to reach. It's obvious that Natalia has been through a lot of trauma reaching back to her childhood. And the series comes down pretty firmly on the side of her being, in fact, the age the Barnetts were initially told she was, and not some secret masquerading adult. But beyond that, the story -- even after hours upon hours of examination -- remains largely opaque. It is a stack of maybe statements: Maybe the Barnetts had nefarious motives for the adoption in the first place. Maybe Natalia's behaviors really were frightening, her age notwithstanding. Maybe it's a double twist where she looked like a monster, then a victim, then a monster again. There are times when true crime stories really do have something to say underneath their salacious details. Netflix has a series premiering next Wednesday called American Nightmare (a plenty salacious title) about a couple who suffered a home invasion. The woman, Denise Huskins, was kidnapped, driven off in the trunk of a car, and held for 48 hours. The police did not believe her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, that she'd been kidnapped; they believed he'd killed her. And when she was released after being terrorized and raped, they decided it had been a hoax the whole time -- a Gone Girl kind of thing where she faked her own disappearance. The police concluded she made it all up, and they said so on television, condemning her for wasting their time and resources. The couple only found vindication when a detective from another town connected them to crimes she was investigating and the attacker was caught, tried and convicted. Is it a wild story? It really is. It's not hard to understand why the police were initially skeptical given some of the weird details of what happened; Quinn says so himself. But there's something else there, a reason to know that story. (There's also an exceptional two-part 2021 episode of the podcast Criminal that features extensive interviews with Huskins and Quinn.) It's more about the police focus on a particular narrative, and about their stubbornness and unwillingness to consider any other possibilities once they made the decision that this attack had never happened. By contrast, there's no reason, really, to know the amount of information about Natalia's story that you'll find in these series. The story begs for insight and the filmmakers don't have any. It begs for solutions and they don't explore any. They treat the participants, including a traumatized young woman, like dolls to be posed in a variety of scenarios that you're invited to debate for their plausibility. There could absolutely be an exploration here of adoptions, of international adoption, of adoption of disabled kids, and of the pernicious influence of various prejudices -- but there isn't. Dirty tricks, yes. But also something more mundane and less ethically significant: it's unsatisfying. Newsletter continues after sponsor message Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More We Recommend I've only played a couple hours of Alan Wake 2, the mystery-horror game that feels a bit like Stephen King crossed with The X-Files. But it's an interestingly designed thing, with solving strategies I haven't encountered before. And its monster-things are really ... quite unsettling. Since I was off last week, I didn't get a chance to share writer Tom Scocca's extraordinary piece in New York Magazine about his (ongoing) medical mystery. It digs into the frustrations of dealing with the medical system, but also with the simple fact that sometimes people who are doing their very best cannot explain what happens to a body, and cannot help. The Hulu film Self Reliance is the feature directorial debut of Jake Johnson, who also stars alongside Anna Kendrick and a very ... let's say offbeat version of Andy Samberg. It's about a depressed guy who is invited to play a game where he gets a million dollars if he can evade hunters who will try to kill him for 30 days. I'm not 100 percent sure that the film gets where it's trying to go philosophically, but I appreciated its messy aesthetic and the performances from Johnson and Kendrick. The very fact that it's clearly trying to say and be about something when it comes to isolation, kindness, interconnectedness and so forth had me chewing on it for a while. What We Did This Week Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures Aisha and Glen talked with Bilal Qureshi about the film All Of Us Strangers. Glen went dark talking about Night Swim with Jordan Morris and Kristen Meinzer. Glen kept it up, covering Baldur's Gate 3 with NPR games guy James Perkins Mastromarino. (I have only played a bit of that game, and I think when Glen asked me what I played as and I said, "Uhhh ... half-elf? I think?", it was as disappointed as I've ever made him.) The week of Glen rolled on as he and I talked to Wailin Wong and Andrew Limbong about the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of the movie Mean Girls. Have you heard about Glen? He wrote your primer on the ins and outs of Emmy eligibility this year. And Stephen had a great chat with Ayesha Rascoe for Weekend Edition about the resurgence of "Murder On The Dance Floor." What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Wailin Wong: Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts Andrew: What Makes This Song Stink Glen: Fargo Linda: Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! 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