The Good Daughter opens with the kind of formative act of violence that thrillers typically save for climactic flashbacks. Two masked gunmen looking to exact revenge on a small-town Georgia defense lawyer invade his home to find only his wife and two daughters. This nightmare continues that day and reverberates through the girls’ adult lives. Front-loading this key trauma allows the Peacock series, premiering Nov. 12, to make it the basis of maybe a dozen more trauma dumps over the course of its six gloomy episodes. Search for meaning amid the misery, and you’ll find it’s trauma all the way down.
A couple of decades after the above tragedy, the younger sister, Charlie Quinn (Meghann Fahy), is a lawyer working with her dad Rusty (Brendan Gleeson). Brash and crude yet fond of quoting highbrow literature—and pariahs in a town that blames Rusty for multiple real or perceived miscarriages of justice—father and daughter are in rough shape. He’s a sickly, aging drinker. Separated from her husband (Michael Dorman), Charlie awakens one morning with a phone belonging to last night’s hookup (Jake McDorman). She brings it to the high school where he teaches (and she spent some of the worst years of her life as a student) and happens to be present for a fatal shooting. But something doesn’t add up about the apparent culprit, Kelly (Shayna Benardo), a poor, placid girl with learning difficulties. She’s the perfect client for Rusty.
A few twists later, Charlie’s estranged sister Sam (Rose Byrne) is summoned home after a long absence—and drawn into Kelly’s case. Sam is a lawyer too, though her safer and more lucrative specialty is patents. But in all other respects, she’s managed her trauma by becoming the opposite of her surviving family members: a rich, uptight, black-clad urbanite.
Byrne, Gleeson, and Fahy (the standout here) are great actors, but there’s only so much they can do for a script built on coincidence and contrivance. One death happens at such a convenient moment, it’s comical. Worse is how The Good Daughter, adapted by veteran suspense author and rookie showrunner Karin Slaughter from her 2017 best seller, collects horrors, as though cataloging everything awful that could happen to a woman. Sure, it exposes one gender’s brutality to another, but that isn’t exactly unexplored territory, especially in this genre. Real mysteries, like what keeps Rusty in a town and a job that destroyed his family, are shrugged off with portentous metaphors about stories—who has the power to tell them, who gets to rewrite their own. In bringing this book to TV, Slaughter might have entrusted the latter task to someone else.
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