'Good American Family' review:Series doesn't know what it wants to be

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The adoption of Natalia Grace gets the limited series treatment in "Good American Family" on Hulu, not long after the premiere of the most recent season of "The Curious Case of Natalia Grace," the documentary series about the same story on Max.

It's about Natalia, a girl born with a form of dwarfism, who is adopted by the Barnett family of Indiana in 2010 and then abandoned by them after they claimed she was not a prepubescent child, but actually an adult.

This eight-episode treatment stars Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass as Kristine and Michael Barnett, and Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia. The creator is Katie Robbins, whose past includes a writing stint on "The Affair."

MY SAY It's not hard to see why this incredibly strange and disturbing true story would have gotten the docuseries treatment.

But it's difficult to understand why anyone thought we needed this fictionalized version of it. A viewing of the first two episodes of "Good American Family" reveals a chaotic jumble of tones, emotions and perspectives.

For Kristine, who loves to remind everyone about how much she loves helping kids, the experience quickly becomes horror fodder. It's filled with scenes of Natalia looming bedside with a knife, thrashing and acting out, and doing sinister things like beheading one of her siblings' stuffed animals.

Michael doesn't really grasp any of this, or perhaps doesn't want to grasp it, as he bonds with Natalia and develops a close dad-daughter relationship. He's portrayed as delusional and aloof. On the job at Circuit City (this is a period piece after all), he's manic to the point of being insufferable.

Initially, anyway, Pompeo and Duplass play these characters as broadly as possible, to the point where they become caricatures of nightmarish suburban archetypes. The actors struggle with the wild emotional swings. It's difficult to endure even a few minutes in their presence.

Reid has a tough job, needing to seem either menacing or childlike depending on the scene. It's hard to humanize an enigma. She does what she can, but once you've presented the possibility that this person might be a psychotic scammer, no matter the truth, it's a little bit hard to gin up much empathy.

It's possible that an organized vision and operating purpose might crystallize over the remainder of "Good American Family," but after nearly two hours, it's hard to see it. It becomes a challenge to endure a show that jerks its audience around this much, and cannot decide whether it wants to be tabloid-level trashy television with horror leanings, a serious depiction of human failings, an expose of the dark side of the adoption world, the story of a marriage falling apart, or something else.

And if the idea is to do a little bit of all of that, well, that's a lot for even eight episodes.

BOTTOM LINE Who is this for?