L'énigme Natalia Grace

I watched the whole thing in a few days. This is a documentary where you root for absolutely no one, except a few (not even all) of the neighbors. The family is despicable (note: the mom capitalized on her son's autism by writing a book when he was a child that made her a TON of money and TED talks, etc).

The adopted girl/person is clearly a liar and frankly, I don't trust anything she said, the family is ridiculously unlikable, and the main interviewee, the father Michael, is awful to the point of wanting to turn it off. He's obnoxious, dishonest, hyperactive, and histrionic.

Altogether, I hope they all lose - and while that may sound unbelievably cruel if you believe one of the two narratives provided in the doc, I really believe something in the middle, and root for none of them.

How is it that scientists can determine the age of ancient humans from over 200,000 years ago, but no medical doctor could determine this poor girl's age.

Also, 90% of the people interviewed in this doc are despicable, foolish and/or ignorant people.

This Michael Barnett is an especially dubious character. I want to compare him to a used car salesman, but that would be insulting to the salesmen. He sure is one slimy, narcissistic, manipulative piece of garbage.

I am giving this a rating of 6 though because it's very entertaining. I'm losing time and brain cells watching it, but I can't seem to turn away.

The story is very compelling and wild on its own, I don't understand why parts are done in a corny, early-2000s TLC reality show style. The show is so ridiculously overproduced, it can be hard to watch and take seriously.

It only gets worse with season 2. Just tell the story and don't add the sensational nonsense that cheapens it.

If you can stomach the scenes that seem like it's the umpteenth time someone delivered a line, there is still a really good story to unpack and some of the interviews are a breath of fresh air that helped me hang in there.

That's all I had to say about the show but had to add more text to meet the minimum. :/

This story is CRAZY!! I don't understand people giving the series a low rating bc they don't like the events that transpired. What's the point of you watching true crime?! Of course it's all heinous, and it's nothing you would thumbs up if you were reviewing the acts themselves, but you aren't. It does what most do, provides you with one side and then the other and you end you not knowing how you feel about it ("I love you, Now die" was the same way).

It's creepy, it's insane to imagine these things happened for real (bc I have seen "the orphan" movies), and yes the dad is a horrible actor, performing what he thinks is necessary to emote his storyline, but the series is still very interesting!

If you binged it so hard bc you had to hear the rest of the story, and then gave it a low rating bc you didn't like the outcome, you shouldn't be rating tv or film.

I'm giving this documentary a high rating solely because I went in believing that this could have been a case of an adult posing as a child and I came out thinking the exact opposite.

Michael Barnett was not believable in the least and did himself no favors with the show. I disliked him immediately. I feel bad for their prodigy son who really seems to have suffered some trauma but mostly I feel bad for Natalia. It's quite obvious, if you pay any amount of attention, that she was not an adult but in fact, a child. She was left to fend for herself by an uncaring and highly materialistic family. There was a lot of abuse. That was evident. How much more though? Because I have a feeling she suffered even more than we know.