The Blanchards’ story of abuse and deception prompted a blockbuster BuzzFeed article by Michelle Dean (who also co-created the show with Nick Antosca) and a feature-length HBO documentary (Mommy Dead and Dearest) now, Hulu has adapted the saga into a mini-series that builds on America’s fascination with true crime, bad parenting and scams.
Gypsy is now serving 10 years for second-degree murder Godejohn was sentenced to life. At 23, she snapped, and plotted Dee Dee’s murder at the hands of the boyfriend she met online, Nicholas Godejohn. Gypsy could walk and never needed a feeding tube, yet was forced to keep up the act by her mother. They were survivors of Hurricane Katrina who attended Make-A-Wish trips and charity banquets honoring Gypsy’s fight against leukemia, muscular dystrophy, a feeding tube and a deadly allergy to sugar, among other ailments.Įxcept all the medical conditions were a ruse – concoctions of Dee Dee’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a disorder characterized by fabricated or induced medical conditions for attention or sympathy. Cut to six years earlier, when the Blanchards move into a pink, wheelchair-ramped Habitat for Humanity home in a quiet neighborhood – even before Dee Dee’s death in 2015, the Blanchards were small-town celebrities in Springfield, Missouri. The Act begins at the end of their relationship, on a night in 2015 when police find Dee Dee murdered in her bed.
Such is the odd in-between feeling of watching The Act, Hulu’s five-part mini-series on the bizarre story of inseparable mother-daughter duo Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard. But given that the show’s ominous score hints at creepiness from the first scene, that a hard-knocks neighbor (Chloe Sevigny) has already expressed skepticism about Gypsy’s charity case, and that Dee Dee’s murder was all over both the news in 2015 and the Act’s first episode, Gypsy’s deceptive mobility isn’t a surprise. Gypsy’s furtive steps are revelatory, to a point – Gypsy has spent the prior 50 or so minutes of screen time in a wheelchair, seemingly beset by illnesses that keep her head bald and her frame frail.
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