Sarah Snook Leads Twisty Peacock Thriller

“We’d do anything for our kids. Anything,” asserts Marissa Irvine (Sarah Snook), the desperate mother at the heart of Peacock’s All Her Fault, and like most parents who say the same, she means it. For the sake of her son, missing 5-year-old Milo (Duke McCloud), there is no sacrifice she would refuse, no desperate measure she would reject, if that’s what it took to keep him safe.

And yet, as every loving parent could also tell you, 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 (Jake Lacy), endure the living nightmare of Milo’s disappearance. While not quite in the top tier of domestic thrillers about wealthy but miserable white families (for which Big Little Lies remains the standard bearer), it’s a reliably engaging time, armed with clever reveals and bracing observations about maternal guilt, paternal arrogance and the uneasy line between the desire to protect and the need to control.

For a while, it almost doesn’t seem to matter what really happened to Milo. From the second Marissa goes to pick him up from a playdate and discovers he’s gone, the immediate instinct — from the cops, the community, the public and even, deep down, the family itself — is to side-eye Marissa for not being attentive enough. Or another local mom, Jenny (Dakota Fanning), for hiring the nanny (Sophia Lillis’ Carrie) suspected of taking him.

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. Not everyone will say those words outright, but the series, created by Megan Gallagher and based on the novel by Andrea Mara, excels at capturing the subtler ways that judgment gets expressed anyway.

It’s in how journalists at a press conference demand to know where Marissa, a wealth manager, was while Milo was being taken, without asking the same of her commodities trader husband Peter. Or in how Jenny’s husband, Richie (Thomas Cocquerel), expresses disbelief that she did not notice anything odd while vetting Carrie. (Naturally, it does not occur to Richie that he, too, has dropped the ball, in his case by not being involved in the hiring process at all.)

In that context, a cop asking whether Marissa personally walked Milo into school that morning comes across as both a perfectly reasonable effort to establish a detailed timeline of the boy’s day, and an implicit rebuke of Marissa for merely dropping him off out front. I suspect plenty of parents, mothers in particular, will sigh in recognition as Jenny and Marissa commiserate over how tired they are of being told they’re “amazing” by husbands who can’t be bothered to keep track of their kids’ doctors’ appointments or get up with them in the middle of the night.

But if relatability is part of All Her Fault’s appeal, it comes at the expense of its supporting characters, who start to feel like stand-ins for conversations the show wants to have about family dynamics or gender relations. Jenny and Richie come across not as unique individuals for us to invest in, but as models for a particular form of marital misery. Meanwhile, the relationship between the case’s determined detective, Alcaraz (Michael Peña), and his disabled adolescent son, Sam (Orlando Ivanovic), while touching in its warmth, might as well have a “Not All Men” sign flashing over it.

The show fares better with the Irvine clan, which in addition to Milo, Marissa and Peter includes Peter’s sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), a recovering drug addict, and their brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), a disabled day trader. (Also among the family’s inner circle is a friend, Colin, played by Jay Ellis, who exists solely to drive the plot.) The siblings’ codependent connection, forged in childhood trauma, functions as a dark mirror to the parental bond driving the main mystery, intersecting with it in ways that are excitingly difficult to predict from the outset but — thanks to the soothingly competent, methodical investigation by Alcaraz — ultimately satisfying.

Also effective is the picture that gradually emerges of the two parents at the center of this whole thing. Snook is excellent at playing tremulous and overwhelming feeling without ever seeming hammy or phony, and Marissa’s raw emotion anchors All Her Fault in something real even as the plot reveals grow increasingly (and enjoyably) outrageous.

But its most fascinating portrait, and slipperiest performance, belongs to Lacy. Having broken out embodying nice guys (The Office, Obvious Child) and then pivoted more recently to toxic douchebags (The White Lotus), he locates in Peter the precise point at which the former morphs into the latter, and then back again.

“I get it now,” a character reflects near the end of the series, once the dust has settled. “Why we just jump to accuse people, even when we don’t know anything. It’s because it’s a comfort. Anticipating someone being punished, that makes us feel good. We get to focus on their pain, instead of our own.” Like any mystery worth its salt, All Her Fault does eventually get to a point where we know everything there is to know, and exactly where to place our blame. Its touch of savvy is understanding how easily blame can be dropped on some people or deflected by others, and why we’re so eager to cast it in the first place.