As if parents of young children needed any more nightmare fuel, Peacock’s All Her Fault offers a terrifying scenario to top off the tank: You arrive at the house where your 5-year-old is supposed to be having a playdate, but the woman who answers the door has never heard of the boy, his friend, or the friend’s mother. So you try to call the other mom, but the number she’s been texting you from is disconnected. When you reach the parent representative for the kids’ class, she says your child can’t possibly be with the boy you think he’s visiting; that boy is with her. Finally, you get the real phone number of the woman you believed had picked up your son from school hours earlier, and she knows nothing about a playdate.
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All of this happens within the first five minutes of All Her Fault, whose full 8-episode season will arrive on Nov. 6. Based on the best-selling novel by Andrea Mara, this domestic thriller—yes, another one—is so ill-conceived and poorly executed, on so many levels, that it’s hard to know where to start. The writing is mechanical. The plot alternates between obvious and nonsensical. Creator Megan Gallagher (Wolf) doesn’t suggest thematic takeaways so much as scream them, repeatedly, as if in hopes of awakening a half-asleep viewer. Led by Succession standout Sarah Snook (also an executive producer) and The White Lotus’ perfectly punchable Jake Lacy, in roles that lazily lift elements from those performances, the formidable cast is squandered. Worst of all, by this genre’s standards, the show is so misguidedly moralizing, it’s not even fun.
The title All Her Fault automatically raises the question: Who is “her”? The most conspicuous candidate is Snook’s Marissa Irvine, the mother who shows up on a stranger’s doorstep to pick up her son, Milo (Duke McCloud), on that miserable day. Marissa and her husband, Peter (Lacy), are both big shots in finance—which means she’s an extraordinarily busy working mom, as well as introducing the likelihood that Milo was kidnapped for ransom. Another possible “her” is the friend’s mom, Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning, who was wonderful in last year’s Ripley), an also-overworked publishing exec whose cartoonishly jerky husband, Richie (Thomas Cocquerel), takes no interest in parenting: (“I do my own thing,” he drawls.) Both families have nannies who could be “her.” The Irvines’, Ana (Kartiah Vergara), has just left on a suspiciously timed vacation. Ana appears to be hiding something about her connection to the Kaminskis’ nanny, Carrie (Sophia Lillis). Then again, maybe every female character is the eponymous “her.” Which would mean the show is not about a woman, but about the plight of women in general.
Indeed, for the first few episodes of a season that’s two or three hours too long, Gallagher seems laser-focused on a feminist message, though not a novel one. Sure, 21st-century women can have high-powered jobs; they can even be the breadwinner in a heterosexual marriage. They just shouldn’t expect husbands like Richie or Jake—a smarmy, needy alpha preppy—to take on their fair share of the domestic labor. Even beyond these bad marriages, nearly every male character is an aggressor, while nearly every woman is a victim. And by the series’ midpoint, Jenny functions almost solely to articulate observations about the patriarchy that were already abundantly clear. “I’m tired of being amazing,” she gripes to Marissa in the premiere. Four episodes later, she complains to Richie: “I’m the default parent, and you’re the substitute.” And in case you hadn’t grasped the significance of the title, the episode directly following that one has her wondering: “Why is everything automatically my fault?” This comes across as pandering to the genre’s largely female audience, and not in a way that evinces much respect for these viewers’ intelligence.
All Her Fault eventually uses other characters to introduce other capital-I issues, which distract from the moldiness of the why-women-can’t-have-it-all debate more than they effectively complicate it. Peter supports his two siblings, erratic recovering addict Lia (The Bear’s Abby Elliott, who does get a few good scenes) and Brian (Daniel Monks), who has lived with physical disabilities since childhood. The empathetic lead investigator on Milo’s case, Michael Peña’s Detective Alcaras, has a developmentally disabled, nonverbal 13-year-old son, Sam (Orlando Ivanovic), who would greatly benefit from attending a special-needs school his parents can’t afford. Meanwhile, the Irvines have a second addict in their orbit: Marissa’s business partner, Colin (Insecure’s Jay Ellis, wasted), whose drug of choice is gambling. Apparently each set of doubles is supposed to add up to a coherent theme. We see economic inequity intersect with disability, and how people who’ve fought addiction struggle to win back their loved ones’ trust. Yet the only connections between these ideas and the central story are logistical. They’re thematic red herrings.
A cast that features Snook, Lacy, Fanning, Peña, Elliott, and Ellis should be enough of an asset to at least partially redeem a poorly made show. But none of these performers are used to their full potential. Snook and Lacy, who display such sharp instincts in their best work, seem to have been directed to overact; cameras freeze on their exaggeratedly bewildered or angry or devastated expressions, putting exclamation points at the end of too many scenes. The others are just underwritten pawns in a contrived mystery. Elliott and Ellis’ characters are their addictions. (I also have trouble recalling any significant Brian moment that isn’t about his disability.) Among the actors, the highlight turns out to be It breakout Lillis, who imbues Carrie with a vulnerability that smoothes over some sizable gaps in the character’s development.
Pace is a problem from the beginning; the season feels disjointed, meandering off in new and often pointlessly misleading directions as if stalling for time. Then comes a cascade of shocking reveals in the penultimate episode, each a more far-fetched distortion of human psychology as we know it than the last. (The same episode elevates its predecessors’ condescending and demonizing depictions of poor and mentally ill people from subtext to text, though at other points Gallagher seems intent on championing them.) More than one character says something like “You’re not gonna believe this!”—and I rarely did. Surprise is an essential element of any good mystery, but that doesn’t release these stories from the obligation to make some sense.
All Her Fault has a few bright spots. Along with Lillis’ performance and the simple pleasure of seeing Snook enrobed in multiple shades of quiet-luxury beige for the first time since she stopped being Shiv Roy, I was moved by the detective’s rapport with his son—a rare depiction of a kid with special needs whose parents don’t just advocate for him out of a sense of obligation, but genuinely adore him for his sunny, loving personality. None of the above is nearly enough to compensate for its fundamental flaws, especially considering how crowded with domestic thrillers TV has become. Even if you enjoy this kind of show, as I sometimes do, you might consider waiting a week or so for some streaming service to drop the inevitably superior next variation on the genre. And if you tune in anyway? It will be nobody’s fault but your own.