In "The Girl From Plainville," Elle Fanning plays Michelle Carter, who became infamous in 2015 when she was indicted on a charge of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan), to kill himself. The ensuing trial (historical fact spoiler alert), which found Carter convicted, was national news, covered in well-researched magazine pieces and barely informed social media posts. It's also the subject of the 2019 two-part HBO documentary "I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter" and the 2018 Lifetime movie "Conrad & Michelle: If Words Could Kill." She seemed easy to hate, at the time, at a glance.
Michelle and Conrad, called Coco by his family, met in real life on vacation in Florida; they lived not terribly far from each other in Massachusetts but conducted their subsequent relationship remotely, mainly through texts, a flurry of words out of which they built a disastrous bubble. It was these texts, which demonstrated Conrad's determination to kill himself and Michelle's to help or make — that is the question — him do it, that constituted the bulk of the case. And it was a text from Michelle to a friend confessing (or claiming) that it was her fault that Conrad died that led to her conviction: In the midst of gassing himself in a truck in a Kmart parking lot, he got scared and got out, Michelle wrote, and she told him to get back in.
Created by Liz Hannah ("The Post") and Patrick Macmanus ("Dr. Death"), with Lisa Cholodenko ("Unbelievable") directing the first two episodes, the new miniseries is thoughtful and intelligent. Like most such series in the Hook 'Em and Hold 'Em streaming era, it is, at eight episodes, longer than it needs to be, but individual scenes are well written and well played, with a minimum of filler. The tone is neither sensationalistic nor judgmental. It looks good. It touches the main factual bases, with customary adjustments for narrative convenience. (For some reason, Michelle is represented as 18 at the time of Conrad's death, when she was a year younger.) If some of its dramatic contrivances raise questions, or feel a little ridiculous, it's not hard to understand the thinking behind them.
