It’s clear we’re supposed to find Hulu‘s true-crime miniseries Good American Family unsettling and upsetting. And we do — just not always for the reasons the show intends.

Good American Family, which dropped its first two episodes (of eight) on Wednesday and stars Grey’s Anatomy‘s Ellen Pompeo, dramatizes the real-life ordeal surrounding Natalia Grace, a young girl with dwarfism whose adoption by an American family in 2010 ultimately devolved into tragedy. That’s all I’ll say here about the outcome of the story, for those unfamiliar with the full Natalia Grace case, but her peculiar adoption journey was previously chronicled in the Investigation Discovery docuseries The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (available to stream on Max).

Whether you’ve seen the ID doc, consumed other media about Natalia, or went in totally blind to Good American Family on Wednesday, you can sense very early in Hulu’s retelling that something is amiss (though, notably, these first two episodes are told from the perspective of Natalia’s adoptive parents, as stated by a legal disclaimer at the top of each hour; the series will employ a different POV in weeks to come). Shortly after Kristine Barnett (Pompeo) and Michael Barnett (The Morning Show‘s Mark Duplass) adopt 7-year-old Natalia, Kristine observes concerning behavior in her daughter, along with some unexplained discrepancies in Natalia’s adoption paperwork. Natalia’s moods are erratic, she’s noticeably cold to Kristine while bonding quickly with Michael, and she sometimes seems legitimately interested in harming others, including her new siblings.

And yet, none of these chilling narrative moments are what stuck with me after watching Good American Family‘s debut. Instead, they’re eclipsed by some of the show’s truly bizarre creative choices, namely the sequence that closes Episode 2 and feels entirely surreal in its execution. In the scene, Kristine follows Natalia into the bathroom at their house, hoping to ask her why she seems to have destroyed a beloved stuffed animal belonging to one of Kristine’s sons. But Natalia is caught off guard by the bathroom door opening, and she shoos Kristine away while trying to cover her bottom half.

Kristine leaves as requested… but then, while standing right outside the bathroom door with Natalia still inside, Kristine blurts out to her husband, “Michael, she has hair!” “What? What hair?” he asks, to which Kristine responds, “Down there. I don’t think she’s a little girl.” Then, in a baffling moment of intended comedy (I’m guessing), Kristine’s mother earnestly offers some baked goods to the household, yelling from the kitchen, “Who wants kringle?” And… roll credits.

Now, the detail of Natalia’s potentially early puberty is one that Good American Family couldn’t avoid including; in real life, Kristine did speculate about some physiological signs of maturity in her daughter, prompting her to believe Natalia wasn’t really 7 years old. But surely this scene could have unfolded differently. Could Kristine not have waited for a more private moment to tell Michael what she saw, ideally when Natalia wasn’t standing on the other side of a thin door? Could that clunky, creepy dialogue not have been finessed a little? And why play this unnerving cliffhanger for laughs via Kristine’s mother’s offscreen invitation for pastry, followed by a needle drop of Green Day’s “Basket Case” that worked well earlier in the episode, but feels totally out of place over the credits?

The whole segment is disconcerting, and it sets a jumbled tone for a show that, up until this point, seemed to be treating its complicated subject matter with appropriate seriousness (albeit some one-sided storytelling). It’s one thing to dramatize Natalia Grace’s experience with the Barnetts; to satirize it, even a little bit, is something much worse.

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