Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Girl From Plainville
Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus, the creators of the Hulu limited series The Girl From Plainville, out March 29, knew they had to handle the true story of Michelle Carter’s unprecedented “texting-suicide” case with care. “One false moment could ultimately do some real damage,” Macmanus, who also created the Peacock series Dr. Death, tells TIME. “It was our responsibility to not sensationalize this story and to adhere to the truth as much as we could.”
The series, which is an adaption of Jesse Barron’s 2017 Esquire article of the same name, looks at the 2017 case in which Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of her boyfriend Conrad “Coco” Roy III over text messages that, prosecutors argued, seemed to encourage the teen to kill himself. Notably, Carter admitted in texts that she was on the phone with him in the moments before his death and could have stopped him, but instead told him to “get back in” his truck as it filled with exhaust fumes. (She was released from jail in 2020 after serving 12 months of a 15-month sentence.)
Hannah, a writer on Hulu’s The Dropout, said she came to the headline-grabbing story with “a very preconceived notion and bias towards” Carter, who had been “portrayed as a black widow and a villain” by the press. “I very quickly realized how wrong I was, at least in what I knew about Michelle,” she said. “It felt like there was an opportunity to show people what I had learned—that she was a three-dimensional human and there was more to this story.”
In 2019, HBO aired filmmaker Erin Lee Carr’s two-part documentary I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter, which covers Carter and Roy’s complicated relationship and the…
Source : time
