The Good Daughter: Peacock’s Trauma-Saturated Mess Wastes Its Stellar Cast | Review

Published Nov 11, 2026, 11:00 AM EST

Liz Hersey is an Editor and Critic for ScreenRant's TV team, editing, reviewing, writing, and creating content about the iconic shows you love to watch. She began her editing career at ScreenRant in 2019, shortly after joining the site as a Writer that same year.

With a passion for all things books, Liz frequently attends Toronto literary events and conferences, and loves interacting with her book lover community. In addition to being an avid reader of the romance and thriller genres, Liz is a writer of several short stories, and is currently at work on a young adult witch novel.

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A family shattered after one fateful day. The fallout is devastating, but move on they must, only for a shocking crime to reopen old wounds and unearth buried secrets years later.

This is a plot that could be used to describe both Peacock limited series thrillers All Her Fault and The Good Daughter. The former, which stars Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning and is based on the novel of the same name by Andrea Mara, earned critical acclaim, award nominations, and broke viewership records for the streamer when it was released a year ago. With its equally starry cast, literary source material, and November release date, Peacock clearly hopes to replicate this success with The Good Daughter. The key difference, however, is that All Her Fault is actually a good show.

On paper, The Good Daughter should be too. The series is not only based on Will Trent author Karin Slaughter's 2017 novel of the same name, but Slaughter also serves as showrunner and wrote all six episodes, with Steph Green (Watchmen) directing and Meghann Fahy, Rose Byrne, and Brendan Gleeson starring.The Good Daughter centers on sisters Samantha "Sam" (Audrey Grace Marshall and Byrne) and Charlotte "Charlie" Quinn (Drew Cheek and Fahy), who survive a violent home invasion in their adolescence. In adulthood, Charlie has remained in their hometown of Pikeville, Georgia, and followed their father, Rusty (Gleeson), into practicing law as a public defender. Meanwhile, Sam has fled to New York, where she has a lucrative job as a patent lawyer. However, when Charlie is first on the scene at a horrific school shooting, Rusty persuades Sam to return and represent the shooter, high school senior Kelly Wilson (Shayna Benardo).

As the estranged sisters work together on the case, they're forced to grapple with painful memories, personal demons, systemic injustice, and what it really means to be the "good daughter". With such a meaty premise and a creative dream team both in front of and behind the camera, it seemed like the stars were aligned for The Good Daughter to take All Her Fault's baton and run with it. Alas, The Good Daughter doesn't so much drop that baton as unceremoniously throw it off a cliff.

The Good Daughter’s One-Note Characters Drag Down Meghann Fahy’s Excellent Performance

For a show whose blunders outweigh its merits tenfold, The Good Daughter comes out swinging with a riveting first episode, and Fahy deserves the lion's share of the credit. From The White Lotus to Siren, Fahy's filmography is peppered with works in which she showcases her unmatched penchant for playing warmly charismatic yet deeply troubled and tormented women, and she plays that to perfection in The Good Daughter, which desperately needs her skills.

When we first meet Fahy's Charlotte, she's not at her best, waking up hungover on her couch following a drunken one-night stand and learning she and her hookup, Mason Huckabee (Jake McDorman), accidentally switched phones. Charlie arranges to meet Huck at the high school where he works as a teacher, but not before taking the time to tidy her place and feed her pet turtle. It's a nice touch that shows that while Charlie is struggling, she isn't a total mess. The rest of the show could have done with more of this nuance.

After the phone exchange, Charlie and Huck hear gunshots in the hall, and that's when the plot really gets cooking. Despite the horrors she witnesses and endures, Charlie's first priority is seeing that Kelly is treated fairly in the eyes of the law, even though that means going up against the corrupt, mustache-twirling Coin brothers, Sheriff Keith (Jayson Warner Smith) and District Attorney Ken (Jason Davis), while dealing with complicated feelings for her assistant DA husband Ben (Michael Dorman), whom she's separated from but still carries a torch for.

Fahy plays all of this fraught drama with the perfect blend of grit and vulnerability, saying as much with a look as with a sharp tongue. Then Samantha shows up, and the story goes splat. After Rusty is attacked and hospitalized, thus no longer able to serve as Kelly's defense attorney (and Charlie is ineligible as a witness), he convinces Sam to come back to Pikeville. She does, bringing a grey cloud of misery with her that eclipses Fahy's radiance.

Fahy alone is what keeps The Good Daughter from being totally unwatchable.

To be clear, this is no fault of Byrne's. One of today's most versatile actors, Byrne earned an Oscar nomination for her masterful performance in 2025's If I Had Legs I Kick You, where she proved her ability to play raw, complex suffering. She should have been able to let those talents loose in The Good Daughter too, but the problem is that Sam is a character entirely defined by her trauma.

In fairness, the atrocities she endured the night of the home invasion would have a permanent impact on anyone, but the show needed to do more than remind us of that every time Sam appears onscreen in her horrendous, all-black wardrobe. Charlie cracks more than a few jokes about Sam's attire, at one point calling her Morticia Addams. While an apt comparison, the key difference is that Morticia actually has a personality.

At the other end of the spectrum is Rusty, who is all personality but with absolutely no substance. A hard-drinking yet soft-spoken man of the people, Rusty's purpose is to lighten the mood with his folksy charm, which Gleeson dials up way too high. However, Slaughter's script doesn't give him much choice; Rusty literally carries around — I'm not making this up — a red clown nose to put on whenever things get too serious. The on-the-nose joke writes itself.

His Flannery O'Connor-inspired dialogue is even worse, as Rusty lays the sauce on so thick that all his scenes are positively drowning in cliché at best and absolute nonsense at worst: "Therapy’s like picking a booger; you’ve gotta know what you’re gonna do with it before you start."... What?!

With such poor characterization for Sam and Rusty, the show's compelling first episode feels even more like a bait-and-switch. However, given how messy the rest of the story is, it's safe to say Fahy alone is what keeps The Good Daughter from being totally unwatchable.

The Good Daughter Is A Maudlin Family Drama & An Underserved Legal Thriller, Both Way Too Obsessed With Female Trauma

Each episode title of The Good Daughter is a variation on "What Happened to" — "What Happened to Charlie", "What Happened to Sam", etc. This tells you everything you need to know. The Good Daughter cares about one thing, and one thing only: things happening to women, and — spoiler alert — none of them are good.

With the exception of Rusty's secretary Lenore (Harper Steele, a welcome ray of sunshine) and Ben's coworker Kaylee Collins (Lauren Farmer), a character so slut-shamed she belongs in an American Pie movie, every female character in The Good Daughter is a victim first and foremost.

The series lives up to its title, in that most of The Good Daughter is about how the night of the home invasion shaped Sam and Charlie, resulting in their estranged relationship. However, whereas shows like All Her Fault ​​​​​​feature clever twists told in intriguing ways that captivate the audience and serve the characters, the reveals about the Quinn sisters are less pieces of a puzzle and more drops in their respective cups of suffering, to the point that the better title would be The Good Victim.

The Good Daughter is much more interested in punching its everything-bad-that-can-happen-to-a-woman bingo card than it is in telling a decent story.

The legal storyline is, at least in part, more interesting. Not only does it light a much-needed fire under Sam when she takes Kelly on as a client, but The Good Daughter does a solid job of highlighting the sobering reality of how the deck is stacked against Kelly, an impoverished teenager with an intellectual disability who is all too vulnerable to vile exploitation and systemic scapegoating.

Unfortunately, this takes a backseat to Sam and Charlie's good-daughtering, and by sidelining Kelly after putting her through the wringer, the show exploits her every bit as much as the broken systems it wags its finger at. It all adds up to the grim truth that The Good Daughter is much more interested in punching its everything-bad-that-can-happen-to-a-woman bingo card than it is in telling a decent story.

What's so frustrating is that gender-based trauma and institutional misogyny can be explored in thoughtful ways on the small screen, and have. Big Little Lies got the ball rolling, introducing these topics to prestige television and inspiring myriad future series to follow its lead. Just this year, Furious didn't so much tackle these issues as beat them to a bloody pulp and set them on fire in the most satisfying on-screen depiction of female rage in recent years.

Granted, both Big Little Lies and Furious were created by industry veterans, while The Good Daughter is Slaughter's first time writing for television and, with the novel being over 500 pages, an ambitious choice for a six-episode miniseries — one that did not pay off. Suffice it to say, the show is not in the same league as her other adaptations, Will Trent, or even the better off forgotten Pieces of Her. Despite the familiar beloved faces, The Good Daughter is ultimately an unpleasant, poorly constructed series. Last word.

All six episodes of The Good Daughter release Thursday, November 12, on Peacock.

Cast

• 

  Meghann Fahy

  Charlotte Quinn

• 

  Rose Byrne

  Samantha Quinn

Sisters Charlie and Sam Quinn have spent two decades living with the aftermath of a violent home invasion that killed their mother. Years later, Charlie witnesses a deadly school shooting in their Georgia hometown, with Sam reluctantly returning to help her investigate the attack.

Pros & Cons

• Fahy delivers an excellent performance
• The first episode presents a compelling hook
• Offer glimpses of an intriguing legal thriller

• Byrne's character is pancake-flat, while Gleeson's is unwatchably annoying
• Leans too far into its maudlin family melodrama, completely sidelining the legal storyline
• Is uncomfortably obsessed with female trauma