Michelle Carter began texting Conrad Roy III back in 2012, when her obsession with Glee was at its peak. Even with her preoccupation with the show’s drama, she likely never imagined that her own life would be turned into a television series one day—one with a subject much more sinister than the high school music ever dared attempt. But on March 29, The Girl From Plainville will debut on Hulu, starring Elle Fanning as Carter, a 17-year-old who encouraged her boyfriend via text to commit suicide successfully.
One of the story’s entry points into the collective American psyche happened here at Esquire, with an in depth feature that ran in 2017. That remarkable work serves as the backbone of the fit-for-screen adaptation, and the show’s first trailer is now streaming here below, exclusively.
The miniseries follows Carter through her 2017 trial, and, via flash backs, attempts to chart out the relationship between Carter and Roy as it led up to the day that Roy committed suicide in 2014. When the story first broke, Carter was labeled a monster and “ice queen,” but the Hulu show aims to dig deeper, asking what else was at play in the lives of both of these troubled teens?
Jesse Barron, the writer of the original feature, serves as a consulting producer on the series. Speaking to Esquire, he said, “You have to go beyond [just humanizing these characters] and actually tell a story where the psychology gets way more complicated. The forces get way more multifarious and visible.” Barron embedded in the small New England community throughout the trial. His copious notes and interviews—some of which weren’t included in the Esquire piece—helped expand the feature into a series. “You get into these broader issues of teenage relationships, of technology, of mental health, of the pressures on these families,” Barron adds. “And the story becomes almost ideally more like reading a good novel than just like reading a piece of journalism.”
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The case set a precedent, changing the way technology and the law intersect forever. While Carter was ultimately found guilty for a charge of involuntary manslaughter, Barron is certain that the series is going to push viewers to reconsider the gray areas. “I feel like I’m torn between sympathizing between both sides of this,” he says of the finished product. “And I think that a lot of viewers of this show are going to constantly be in that back and forth.”
The first three episodes of The Girl From Plainville will debut on March 29. Episodes will drop weekly on Tuesdays thereafter.
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