True crime has, in a sense, always been en mode: Many cultures have long traditions of prizing dramatized versions of real-life horrors, like the penny dreadfuls of the 19th century and the 13th-century’s Washing Away of Wrongs, possibly one of the first forensic texts. It’s giving us exactly what we want, so maybe it’s time to talk about why we want it so much. The Act, which was adapted from a wildly popular 2016 BuzzFeed feature by Michelle Dean, the show’s writer and cocreator, is simply a product of its culture. But don’t blame the show alone for its dubious existence.
It feeds a combined obsession with true crime and scams for a sensationalized, tabloid, sleazy depiction of the lives of real human beings, with a strangely passive, dissociated presentation that fails to engage with what it depicts, or the issues it brings up. Hulu’s The Act, a dramatization of the lives of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a mother/daughter pair who became ensnared in an extreme case of factitious disorder imposed on another (formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy) until Gypsy Rose conspired with her boyfriend to kill her mother in 2015, is the latest entry in crime dramas being pumped out by streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee Blanchard and Joey King as Gypsy Rose Blanchard in The Act (Photo credit: Brownie Harris/Hulu)
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