The Act Review: La Maison du Bon Reve & Teeth (Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2)
Hulu debuts its seasonal crime anthology series this week with two episodes. The Act Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2, “La Maison Du Bon Reve” and “Teeth” are strong openers to a story that truly is stranger than fiction.
This season is based on the 2016 Buzzfeed News article written by Michelle Dean entitled “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered,” that detailed the story of Dee Dee and Gypsy Blanchard, a single mom and her daughter who lived in Massachusetts.
The strength of these episodes lies in the performances of Patricia Arquette and Joey King. The Act deals with complex and sensitive topics and requires performances that have a visceral component to them, which both Arquette and King deliver.
Dee Dee suffers from factitious disorder imposed on another, formerly commonly called Munchausen by proxy, but if you go into The Act knowing nothing about it, it actually makes it even stranger. On these first two episodes, the focus is on introducing the dynamic between the mother and child, but the framework is carefully laid to build out the story through the rest of the season.
Patricia Arquette doesn’t oversell Dee Dee’s role as a doting mother of a sick girl; balancing a menacing protectiveness with playful joy.
Joey King’s portrayal of Gypsy Rose is moving as well; managing to convey all the emoition of a teenage girl trapped in her mother’s abuse with no words.
The scene where Gypsy stands in the kitchen with whipped cream and an epi pen and is ready to test her mother’s claim that she’s allergic to sugar is a tense and powerful scene that immediately pays off with a sigh of relief when Gypsy doesn’t go into anaphylaxis.
While The Act might have set up Dee Dee and Gypsy’s relationship with these episodes it also showed us how Gypsy is starting to pull away. Gypsy is a teenage girl, and there are parts of life she’s missing.
That wonder on Gypsy’s face when she sees Lacey and her boyfriend, and the longing to be pretty are relatable emotions for any young girl. A heartbreaking scene is after her visit to the dentist when she looks in the mirror and sees her bruised face and toothless smile.
Throughout the two episodes, The Act never loses its tension. It’s a stressful two hours between Dee Dee avoiding the Department of Children and Families, Dr. Lakshmi Chandra being on the trail of the missing medical records, and Gypsy beginning to find a way to break free.
The glimpses into the future also help the story move along, giving the viewers a second impression of what’s to come. It’s curious to see the investigators interact with the artifacts of Dee Dee and Gypsy’s lives and react to them.
Something like Dee Dee’s cabinet full of pills could have been played off as an exaggeration until later in the season, but seeing an investigator come in early, find the pill bottles and say, “all of this is for one kid?” reminds us that it’s not normal and that something bigger is definitely going on.
I tried to go into The Act with no knowledge of this particular story, even though I do have prior experience learning about factitious disorder imposed on another.
The way the story is presented makes it easy to view it as a drama, and see how the events unfold, and with the amazing performances of Joey King and Patricia Arquette, it’s set up to be a very addictive series so far.
What did you think of this episode of The Act? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Act airs Wednesdays on Hulu.
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Lauren Busser
Lauren Busser is an Associate Editor at Tell-Tale TV. She is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in Bitch Media, Popshot Quarterly, Brain Mill Press Voices, and The Hartford Courant.