Conrad Roy III, known to his family as “Coco”, was an 18-year-old from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts who died by suicide in July 2014. In the wake of his death it emerged that his girlfriend Michelle Carter, from nearby Plainville, had repeatedly texted, phoned and emailed Roy encouraging him to kill himself. In their final phone call, she ordered him to get back inside the truck he had left in fear as it filled with carbon monoxide. In 2017, Carter stood trial charged with involuntary manslaughter for her part in Roy’s death, in what became a high-profile and precedent-setting court case.
The sad, complicated tragedy of Carter and Roy has been told several times before. There was a 2018 Lifetime movie starring Bella Thorne and Austin P McKenzie, Conrad & Michelle: If Words Could Kill, and a 2019 HBO documentary, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter. There was also a sensitively written 2017 Esquire feature by Jesse Barron, The Girl From Plainville, which inspired and informed this new Hulu adaptation from writers Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus. While the empathetic series doesn’t go so far as to extend Carter forgiveness for the awful crime of which she was eventually convicted, it does offer a modicum of understanding as to how and why this adolescent tragedy unfolded.
