Perhaps no series better represents Warner Bros. Discovery’s ongoing fall from grace than The Curious Case from Natalia Grace. At first blush, the true story told by these documentaries is a compelling and tragic one: a Ukrainian orphan with dwarfism is adopted by a family in suburban Indiana, who accuse her of being an adult woman in disguise, prompting them to have her age legally change, kicking off a long, winding legal saga punctuated by scandal and abuse. Regardless of whether or not you believe this story is told in a sensitive, tactful, and responsible manner (and as my previous reviews had made clear, I don’t believe it was) by the filmmakers, the quality of the filmmaking itself is reason enough to give it a firm thumbs down. By placing it on Max, the streaming service that used to carry the proud banner of HBO, WBD seemed like they were trying to impart a sense of prestige on a series that’s shot and presented like generic reality TV slop. I don’t know that this is something I can blame directly on David Zaslav, WBD’s much criticized CEO, but smuggling a low rent Investigation Discovery series onto the same platform that brought us The Jinx is reflective of the executive’s past in, as Vanity Fair put it, “service-y middlebrow reality programming,” although describing The Curious Case of Natalia Grace as “middlebrow” is probably a compliment at this point. Instead, it’s mere content – a series of hooks dangled in front of the audience promising something interesting, only to serve up empty calories instead. 

And yet, I’ll give WBD and the series’ production team this: I kept watching, partly out of obligation to continue covering it, but also because I did, genuinely, want to know what happened, even if the process of doing so was insulting to my (and most viewers’) intelligence. Natalia Speaks ends with a genuine cliffhanger: Cynthia and Antwon Mans, the seemingly kindly couple who literally picked Natalia off of the street and adopted her as their own daughter, leave a voicemail for the producers accusing their adoptive daughter of “tweaking” and “stabbing her family in the back” – leaving open the door that, despite the sympathetic picture painted of Natalia in the previous seasons, there still might be something sinister about her after all. I knew I probably wasn’t going to enjoy the four episodes that make up The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: The Final Chapter that would (hopefully) put this sordid tale to bed, but I knew that I was going to enjoy not knowing what happened even less, so, despite my protestations – and to paraphrase our current present – I kept watching this garbage.

Of course, if you’re a person with a functioning brain, you probably already deduced that there wasn’t anything sinister about the abused, possibly trafficked girl at the center of this story and, as has been the case for the entirety of the series, it’s actually her adoptive parents who are the sinister ones. After Antwon suggests to the producers that they discuss the specifics of their recent blow up on camera “so that nobody tries to drum up some crazy narrative” (because when I’m involved in a family dispute, my first thought is always “let’s discuss this in front of a bunch of people who have a financial stake in keeping my life as dramatic as possible”), the film crew, led by producer Eric Evangelista, touch down in Tennessee (where the Manses have moved from Indiana, the setting for the series’ first two seasons) to try and figure out what’s going on. The Manses try to frame their dispute as a cultural one – evidently, Natalia met a British man online, identified only as “Neil,” and began a long distance relationship with him. The Manses say that, as Christians, their family participates in more formal “courting” as opposed to dating, and that Neil was trying to sow discord within the family by telling Natalia that her parents were treating her unfairly. “Courting,” a strict dating system in which prospective husbands and wives are chaperoned on dates and aren’t even allowed to hold hands before marriage, was popularized among evangelical Christian communities with the publication of Joshua Harris’ book I Kissed Dating Goodbye in 1997. Harris has since disavowed both his own book and Christianity.  

But Evangelista, who makes a few appearances on camera for the first time in the series, thinks something is off. So do Nicole and Vincent DePaul, a little couple in upstate New York who had initially tried to adopt Natalia back in 2009 when her first adoptive family, the Ciccones, decided that they couldn’t care for her. Eventually Natalia, who’s remained in touch with the DePauls, reaches out and asks them to smuggle her out of Tennessee. What follows is one of the only truly compelling cinematic sequences in the entire show – Nicole and Mackenzie, the DePauls’ daughter, fly to Tennessee, hire a private driver, and wait outside of the Manses church with the intent of picking up Natalia, who plans to sneak out during the service. There’s legitimate tension as the DePauls are looking for the right place to park at the church, unaware if they arrived too late or too early, and if Natalia will indeed be able to wiggle her way out of the Manses’ clutches, or if someone from the church will pick up on what’s going on and blow the whistle on the whole operation. It is, I must admit, an effectively structured 15 minutes or so of television.

But thankfully for the real people involved, this tension resolves anticlimactically – Natalia manages to get out of the church, hop in the DePauls’ car, and embark on the long drive to New York (Natalia does not have an ID, so she can’t fly). Unfortunately for the viewer and for the producers, who clearly struggle to justify the four episode length of this season, what happens over the next three hours or so of the series is not particularly cinematic. Lots of time is spent determining whether or not Antwon Mans is a legitimate bishop or the leader of a cult, as well as the allegedly abusive situation within the Mans home, as multiple witnesses claim to have seen Cynthia whipping and slapping children. From a filmmaking perspective, the strategy is obvious – latch onto another villain with a sensationalistic profile and personality (Antwon claims to be a faith healer and runs what appears to be a lo-fi prosperity gospel operation on YouTube) to drive viewer interest and give them a window into forgotten and grody corner of the American experience. 

Unfortunately for WBD, the Manses are not as willing to participate as Michael Barnette, Natalia’s original Indiana adoptive father, was, and so The Final Chapter lacks the theatrical meltdowns and borderline camp of the first two seasons,which is probably why Barnette and his lawyer, Terrance Kinnard, briefly show up again to provide some absolutely useless commentary on what Natalia might be going through in a clearly half-hearted attempt to get them to say something interesting. Speaking of useless, Beth Karras resumes her role as the show’s “legal analyst,” offering up the most obvious and banal takes you’ll ever find on television, all of which go something along the lines of “if Natalia doesn’t pay her taxes, she’ll end up in trouble.” 

That, by the way, makes up a big source of the tension of the rest of the series. It turns out that Cynthia Mans was listed as the payee on Natalia’s social security benefits, and that the Manses were pretty much controlling Natalia’s finances, including the payout of a large contract she signed when she appeared on Dr. Phil. It’s an objectively awful story – a huckster couple took in a disabled girl and tried to milk her dry – but it’s dramatized in the chintzy reality aesthetic that defined the first two seasons. Lots of angry phone calls on speaker, lots of staged-seeming conversations between Nicole and Natalia about Natalia’s inability to completely separate herself from her parents’ influence, lots of talking head interviews about how stressed out everyone is. Much in the way that Michael Barnette was the main character of the first two-seasons, Nicole DePaul quickly becomes the main character of The Final Chapter, and, as a result, what should be a fairly compelling narrative – Natalia’s attempt to move on from her bizarre and traumatic childhood and become a healthy adult – ends up lacking emotional and psychological complexity primarily because Natalia is never treated as a fully-fleshed out person. In fact, the series remains as exploitative as ever, including a segment about how the DePauls had to tell Natalia to stop having loud phone sex with Neil, ostensibly because it causes Nicole to worry about what information the Manses may have overheard while Natalia was living with them, a point that’s never really followed up on. 

If this all sounds kind of tedious and structureless well, that’s because it is. There isn’t really much of a “climax” to the series, unless you consider shots of Natalia traipsing around Times Square and getting her portrait taken for the cover of People climactic, but one of the show’s central “mysteries” does get resolved: in the process of applying for a passport to go visit Neil, Natalia is officially re-aged by the United States government, reversing one of the key storylines of the first season, when the Barnettes had her legally declared an adult so that they could justify moving her out of their house. It is, at the very least, one small portion of justice bestowed upon Natalia, a good first step to her leading a normal life. And hopefully, for the sake of both her and the TV watching public, that life takes place off camera.