Karin Slaughter on adapting The Good Daughter for TV: 'It nearly killed all of us, but we're incredibly proud'

The Good Daughter was enormously popular when it was first released in 2017 by crime writer, Karin Slaughter.

Back then, it felt ripe for a TV adaptation, and nearly 10 years after publication, it's finally out today on Sky.

It's a suspenseful thriller, wrapped up in a deeply emotional story about love, family and resilience - but above all, it's got an immense cast, staring Meghann Fahy and Rose Byrne as sisters Charlotte and Samantha.

In the tale, the sisters' lives were fractured by a single night of violence and they've spent years trying to recover from the incident.

All that work is undone when another attack splinters the small town of Pikeville, Charlotte, which uncovers twists, painful memories and buried secrets along the way.

Slaughter wrote and executive produced the adaptation, so she is more hands on with the two sisters than anyone else.

Radio Times caught up with her to find out about the process of adapting the book, and also how her thoughts about the bestseller have changed as a result.

With your previous works, you've said before that readers create a version of their own story in their heads. Was there anything that surprised you about this TV adaptation when you finally got to see it on screen?

Karin Slaughter: There were so many different things that surprised me as a writer, to turn something on the page into a visual story and how I can lean into different things. I love figuring out how to tell a story, and this was a great challenge for me. I was doing something different, being a showrunner, looking at the business end of things, writing the scripts, being an executive producer, and I got a dream cast to work with.

On the cast, you got the fantastic Meghann Fahy and Rose Byrne. Did you ever in a million years picture them as your characters?

KS: I pictured Rose many years ago and I asked Bruna Papandrea, our producer, if Rose could do it because they're both Australian and assumed they knew each other. She said, 'Well, don't assume that, but yes, I actually do know her, and she's tied up doing Physical.' But stuff happened, we had the writer's strike, slow downs, etc, and then Rose became available and Bruna managed to do it!"

The time we're living through at the moment, there's a big appetite for crime adaptations, thinking about Slow Horses, Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal and so on. What do you think audiences are looking for in crime stories now that they maybe weren't looking for 10 years ago?

KS: I hate this phrase because it's so Hollywood now, but they're character-forward - and that's always been my writing style. It's not really the violence or the shocks and twists and turns that I think are most engaging about my work, though I do work really hard on those. But, I think the thing that terrifies us most is the thought that got up the same way as a victim of a crime did. They got dressed, they took a shower, they went to work; they did all these normal things and then something really bad happened. If there's any formula to my work, that's what I try to do.

I try to make you feel comfortable in the world, like you belong, and then 'wow', this bad thing happens and you're invested in finding out what happens next.

Why do you think of all of your novels that The Good Daughter is particularly suited to television right now?

KS: It's just a great story about family and sisters who don't really get along well. It's such a fraught relationship and there's so much said and unsaid, particularly with Sam and Charlie. They have this long history and something very traumatic that happened to them when they were children. History is told by consensus and they haven't really put the pieces together of what happened that day because Sam was going through rehab and Charlie was left at home. So they haven't got together until this point...

It's been almost a decade since The Good Daughter was first published. How has your relationship with the book changed over the years, especially now?

KS: I've always been very focused on making sure my work is informative and not exploitative. Part of the reason why I love writing thrillers and being in this crop of amazing thriller writers that I'm in right now, with Gillian Flynn or Mark Billingham and Lee Child. There's a lot of us now who are interested in why crimes are committed. It goes to show, a lot of us grew up in the time where there was an active serial killer!

What we saw was not the treat, but what it does to communities, how it changes people, how it makes people suspicious, how it can really form you and the way you look at the world. That was certainly imbued in our writing and it's something that I was careful to translate onto screen.

Was it really exciting getting behind the scenes and creating the show? Were you a bit scared to start?

KS: I should've been more scared, to be honest! I've always been a very - I don't want to say - blunt person, but I say what I feel and that took a little while for people to get used to, especially in Los Angeles because they talk around a lot of things. But I've always been very direct, and I think the crew appreciated that. And I was fascinated. I mean, I wanted to know what everybody was doing and understand it. So you know, the groups showed me how to move the dolly. I got to operate a crane. I was there with the sound mix. In post, I was always asking questions about you know colouring, sound and music. I loved working with our composer, who's a wonderful person.

I made a promise to myself; If I'm going to do this, I'm really going to do this. I'm going to be on set every day, and I'm going to learn this process. And it really is fascinating. From my perspective, having had other shows like Will Trent and Pieces of Her, if you're on a set, it is the most boring thing in the world unless you have a job to do, and then it's the most exhilarating.

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It could be really easy to be very precious about the details of the novel because that's your project, you created that. But it also must be nice to let that go and the expectations you have?

KS: Absolutely, the book is always the book. It will always be printed and or electronic or whatever. That's my story, and particularly when someone adapts one of my books, I give them permission to do that. So I'd be kind of a jerk to say, 'Yes, I'm going to let you, a very creative person who has a vision for this story, adapt it, but you're going to have to do it exactly how I tell you to do it.' It's one of the reasons why I did The Good Daughter because I wanted the story to really hold from the book to the screen, and it's I think very rare that you have a script that's similar to the book and a show that's similar to the script.

I saw my job as a showrunner to hold all those narrative threads together and give continuity to the voice. One of the wonderful things we did is we had the same director for each episode, so everybody was working. You know, the same teams, hair, makeup, all the continuity people. We all worked on basically a six-hour movie, and I will say it nearly killed all of us. But the result of it is something I'm extremely proud of.

• The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter is available to buy now

The Good Daughter is available to watch on NOW.

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