Elle Fanning will reprise her role as Russia’s longest-ruling female leader in the upcoming third season of “The Great,” but first she’ll tell a much more timely, tech-heavy story. She’s bringing the infamous texting-suicide case to the small screen in “The Girl from Plainville,” a Hulu series inspired by the true story of Michelle Carter’s (Fanning) relationship with Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan). The true crime drama revisits the events that led to the latter’s suicide and the former’s conviction of involuntary manslaughter.
“They’ve opened an investigation into your connection with the death of Conrad Roy,” Michelle is told in a new trailer for the series. The police have thousands of text messages that the highschooler sent to her late boyfriend, proving that she encouraged and even pressured him to kill himself. “She told him to drink bleach,” it’s emphasized. Michelle claims that she was “really just trying to help him,” since “all he thought about was dying.”
HBO released a two-part documentary about Carter and Roy in 2019, Erin Lee Carr’s “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter.” Carr is credited as a consulting producer on “The Girl from Plainville.”
“The Girl from Plainville” hits Hulu March 29. Liz Hannah (“The Post”) and Patrick Macmanus (“Dr. Death”) serve as showrunners. Hannah is an exec producer and writer on another Hulu series based on a true story, “The Dropout,” a portrait of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that drops on the streamer today.
