Peacock’s new thriller All Her Fault is generating serious word of mouth as well as glowing reviews – and I think that’s because the story, based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Andrea Mara, taps into one of our biggest fears: a child disappearing without a trace.
The show focuses on Marissa Irvine, played by Succession’s Sarah Snook, a successful wealth manager whose life is turned upside down when she arrives to pick up her five-year-old son Milo from a playdate. The playdate is at Jenny’s, another school mom (played by Dakota Fanning). But the woman who opens the door is not Jenny or Jenny’s nanny Carrie, who picked Milo up from school that day.
Not only is Milo not there, but the woman says she has no idea who Jenny or Milo are. And then Milo’s tracker is found in the school car park, smashed to pieces.
Why All Her Fault is having a moment
If you have or care for kids, you’ll know that heart-in-the-mouth moment of panic when a child is suddenly not there. And you’ll know the horrible fears that sometimes wander into your mind. I think that being a parent or carer is a bit like having a layer of skin removed: it makes you so much more sensitive to the possible dangers of the world, and its horrors. So, a show that focuses on quite literally the worst thing imaginable, a child vanishing into nowhere, is going to hit hard.
The story unfolds over eight tightly plotted episodes, introducing us to Milo’s dad Peter and dad’s troubled sister; to Ana, the family’s nanny; to Marissa’s best friend Colin; and to Jenny, the woman whose home Milo never arrived at.
The Hollywood Reporter puts it very well, for even the most loving and attentive parent: “the day-to-day grind of child-rearing has a way of finding the limits of that enormous sacrifice: the patience that runs dry after the umpteenth temper tantrum of the day, the bedtimes that get missed because work went late, the harsh realities that no amount of care can protect a child from forever. The twisty new mystery dwells in those cracks, poking and prodding them from all angles as Marissa and her husband, Peter, endure the living nightmare of Milo’s disappearance.”
The show also focuses on maternal and parental guilt, the expectations that moms in particular feel they have to live up to and the way society treats moms who they don’t think measure up to those expectations. As The Hollywood Reporter describes the judgement of others: “Maybe if these working mothers hadn’t been so busy, they wouldn’t have needed outside help. Maybe if they hadn’t been so distracted, they’d have realized something was amiss. Surely then, all of this could have been prevented.”
The Guardian loved every episode. The show “braids a number of popular TV trends together, interrogating White Lotus-style the phenomenon of middle-class US affluence and the protections it offers and corruptions it encourages, a missing child narrative and an examination of the penalty women pay for motherhood. It is rare that all these things are held in balance, without at least one element becoming preachy or the thriller part becoming baggy or preposterous, but All Her Fault manages it brilliantly.”
New York Magazine says it’s “compulsively watchable, worthy of the kind of binge that carves a dent into your couch cushions”, and the Irish Independent agrees: “this is a slick potboiler that piles the unguessable plot twists, revelations and flashbacks – a lot of flashbacks, but with purpose – one on top of another at a dizzying rate and just begs to be binge-watched.”
Don’t let the talk of nannies and affluent couples in nice houses put you off: this isn’t a show about unrelatable rich people; it’s about fears we can all understand and it becomes a tense, twisty nail-biter. Not everyone loved it – the San Jose Mercury News felt that the plotting was “preposterous” and the story unrealistic – but even the harshest critics praised the cast and admitted that it’s still very watchable. The same reviewer called it “guilty fun”.
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