The Act is the rare prestige drama created by predominantly women four of its six writers are women and five of eight episodes were directed by women ( The Mustang director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directed the pilot).
(Gypsy is currently serving out a ten-year sentence for second-degree murder.) The story, with its gothic noir overtones and a fascinatingly twisted mother-daughter relationship at its center, attracted immediate interest from Hollywood now, three years later, it’s the subject of a new Hulu true-crime anthology called The Act, written, showrun, and co-created by Dean and TV veteran Nick Antosca. When Gypsy was in her early 20s - though her mother still claimed she was a teenager - she murdered Dee Dee with the help of her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, who she had met online. In 2016, reporter Michelle Dean wrote a story for BuzzFeed that became an unexpected viral sensation, called ‘Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered.’ For years Dee Dee Blancharde, who had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, had faked her daughter’s illness, confining her unnecessarily to a wheelchair and feeding her through a feeding tube.
