You can accuse “All Her Fault” of a lot of things — exploiting parental anxieties, bland AirBnB home design, criminal misuse of Sarah Snook — but you can’t accuse it of being subtle.
In the Peacock limited series’ first scene, Marissa (Snook) stops by a friend’s house to pick up her son from a playdate. Except Milo (Duke McCloud) isn’t there. Neither is the mom who’s supposed to be watching him. Instead, a bewildered stranger answers the door. While she’s very nice — inviting Marissa inside, offering reassurance, helping her make phone calls — her every kindness only leads to more questions. The number for the mom-in-charge isn’t working. (Why not?) Her son’s playdate pal is at the park with a bunch of other kids. (But not Milo?) After a few exposition-heavy minutes of searching, there’s only one conclusion left for Marissa to draw.
“I don’t know where my son is,” she says, right before the title “All Her Fault” flashes across the screen.
Not subtle, sure — but also, kind of fun? It is for a while, at least, before an overextended story runs out of steam and the delayed answers stretch themselves silly to emphasize a point made patently clear from the start.
Throughout the hour-long premiere, Megan Gallagher’s adaptation of Andrea Mara’s 2021 novel balances the tragic urgency of a missing-kid mystery with the soapy indulgences of a trash-TV thriller. There are leading dramatic beats as suspects are introduced and new information comes to light. There are emotional meltdowns as the family’s fresh reality dawns on each of Milo’s loved ones. And there are outlandish twists that reframe who we like and who we hate, who we’re leery of and who we implicitly trust, and, of course, what we think really happened to the innocent little five-year-old.
The cast largely helps to keep things grounded, rebutting the histrionics by treating each claim with legitimacy or reciting each gauche line with apt conviction. But really, they’re all just suspects, as the first episode’s closing flash-forward to a police lineup of each series regular’s mugshot makes clear.
Marissa runs her own wealth management firm in Chicago, alongside her very handsome business partner, Colin (Jay Ellis). Despite looking like a fighter pilot who could win a game of dogfight football, Colin isn’t framed as a temptation for Marissa, and a lack of sexy secrets proves to be a recurring blind spot for the series, even if those two have plenty of other skeletons in their massive, boring closets. (In case you couldn’t tell from the moneyed term “wealth management,” everyone in this show is filthy rich — which makes the drab interior designs feel like an obvious oversight. They’ve got the cash! Give us our decor porn!)
Instead of pining over co-workers, Marissa is happily married to Peter (Jake Lacy), a commodities broker and, conversely, a gold-star human being. He supports his brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), and his sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), paying for their homes, their food, and their tertiary expenses. He loves his wife sincerely — and he’s happy to prove it. After an early inquiry into his whereabouts — was he with another woman?! — it’s clear he would never cheat on Marissa, and his lack of resentment over the accusation only serves as further evidence of his good-guy bonafides.
Daniel Monks, Abby Elliott, and Jay Ellis in ‘All Her Fault’Courtesy of Sarah Enticknap / Peacock
But… he is played by Jake Lacy, Hollywood’s go-to actor for self-centered douchebags, so he’s not to be trusted. (You could say the typecasting started with “The White Lotus,” and you wouldn’t be wrong, except it actually started with “Carol,” and in this house we do not forget about “Carol.”) Brian is a nice guy, too, but vague allusions to a mysterious accident that left him in constant pain keep the door open to a hidden dark side. Lia’s issue is out in the open: She’s a drug addict who’s spent half of Milo’s life in rehab, so is she as devoted to her nephew as she claims?
And what about Jenny (Dakota Fanning)? The fellow mom from school says she has no idea a playdate was scheduled with her son and Milo, but as another mom cattily voices directly to Jenny: “If someone did take Milo Irvine, why would they pretend to be you?” Yeah, Jenny! Why would they? What are you hiding?! Could it have something to do with Ana (Kartiah Vergara), the nanny, who’s obviously guilty of something? (Because she’s the nanny? Duh?)
For as dismissive as “All Her Fault” can be toward childcare professionals, it does sport a feminist edge so blunt it would struggle to cut Milo’s birthday cake. When Marissa is first interviewed by the police, she’s lightly chided by her otherwise respectful husband for not checking a parent’s phone number against the school registry. When Jenny has to work late one night, her husband won’t stop bugging her with questions about their kid — questions he should know how to answer if he was ever “on duty” (his words) for bedtime. The other moms at school cast dubious glances at both Marissa and Jenny for making mistakes any good mom could avoid, while the media pounces on the women for every perceived error whether it’s rooted in fact or not. As the days mount and tension builds, inequities are exposed as often as breaks in the case.
Lending such prominence to an under-addressed parenting issue — the disparity in childcare, even in “progressive” couples that aim for an equal workload — makes “All Her Fault” that much easier to cheer, especially when you’re already yelling at your TV. If that level the enthusiasm proved sustainable over eight long hours, perhaps Peacock would have another “Apples Never Fall” on its hands. (Hey, that’s another Jake Lacy show!) Instead, episodes start to drag and the big reveals lose steam, leaving Sarah Snook to reign over a series that can’t maximize her skillset.
The series’ failures are not, of course, her fault, and it’s to Snook’s immense credit that a tender moment at the end of the first episode lands at all. If only she had more of them.
Grade: C
“All Her Fault” premieres Thursday, November 6 on Peacock. All eight episodes will be released at once.
