Hulu’s new limited series “The Girl From Plainville,” which premiered at the SXSW festival on March 12, faces, and surmounts, an interesting challenge: Its two lead characters have a relationship based almost entirely on text messages. The sight of someone with their face buried in a phone is hardly novel, nor is it compelling — at least not enough to sustain an eight-episode drama.
The question of whether “The Girl From Plainville,” based on the real-life manslaughter trial of Michelle Carter after she encouraged her boyfriend over text to kill himself in 2014, really needed all of those episodes to tell its story is a fair one. Like many streaming dramas, it feels stretched thin. But its depiction of the virtual relationship between Carter (Elle Fanning) and Coco Roy (Colton Ryan) will keep viewers hanging on, if only just. The pair appear to one another as if they were really present, having an ongoing conversation. It’s only when one or the other are distracted by their real lives — a parent or a friend asking Michelle or Coco to turn their respective attention away from the phone — that the illusion shatters, and that they slip apart.
The consuming nature of virtual communication, and the ways in which reality fades in favor of a simulated intimacy, are what’s at issue here: “The Girl From Plainville” represents the Carter-Roy relationship as one in which both parties lost themselves in a slow-rolling and constant dialogue, eventually allowing themselves to push each other toward tragedy as part of a game neither was equipped to understand. They met by chance on vacation, and lived in different Massachusetts towns with different demands on their time, and so their communication became an endless performance, one in which loose talk lacked the ballast and weight lent by in-person presence. In all, “The Girl From Plainville” ends up a strikingly effective treatment of the very modern question of persona in the digital…