NEW YORK (AP) — After a long day at work, you rush to pick up your child from a playdate with a new friend. But there’s a problem as soon as you get there: The person who answers the door has no idea who your child is — or you. “I think you’ve got the wrong house,” they say.
Your child has disappeared.
This parental kick-in-the-stomach scenario is being manifested onto TV screens with “All Her Fault,” a thrilling series from Peacock that also acts as a subtle satire of the modern marriage.
The questions come fast and furious — Who made the playdate? Who checked out the nanny involved? Did mom really need to be at work? Like the title suggests, “All Her Fault” explores how women get stretched trying to juggle a career while maintaining a household and children — and getting blamed if anything goes wrong.
“I had years and years and years of just trying to do it all, and I nearly hospitalized myself with exhaustion,” says creator, writer and executive producer Megan Gallagher. “So these themes are very, very present in me and in my life. It was painful to dive into at times, but I’m glad I did it.”
Adapted from a 2021 novel by Irish novelist Andrea Mara, the story has been transplanted to America, a transition which it’s creator, unfortunately, says wasn’t hard. “This is very universally understood kind of thing,” says Gallagher.
All eight episodes drop on Thursday.
Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning star
The series stars “Succession” star Sarah Snook as Marissa Irvine, the desperate mother at its heart. She knows all sort of details about her 5-year-old son Milo, like what he was wearing when he disappeared, right down to the little dinosaur decal on his coat. Her husband is clueless.
“It’s assumed that the women are the CEOs of the household and it’s their job to delegate and run and manage projects. And they’re working full-time. I think that that’s when we run into problems,” says Gallagher.
Snook’s Marissa — half of a well-to-do couple who work in finance in the Chicago suburbs — is helped by her new mom friend, played by Dakota Fanning. They lean on each other as they wait for a ransom call and police begin questioning anyone involved.
Snook says she was attracted to a story about female friendship that is empowering and a source of strength. “Usually the presumption would be that they’re definitely going to be pitted against each other,” she says.
It’s soon apparent that husbands in this world blithely go to work while their wives work while also making doctor appointments, packing snacks, arranging pickups and buying uniforms. “I’m tired of being amazing. I don’t want to be amazing anymore,” Fanning’s character says at one point.
Work-life imbalance
“My mother’s generation was so fixated on getting into the workplace,” says Gallagher. “That was what they wanted: ‘Please let me in. Open the doors, let me in.’ They had no exit strategy for the house. My generation has grown up with the assumption that we’ll just do both and that’s sort of what’s been handed to us.”
It’s also a world where mothers are saturated with guilt — that their children like their nanny more, that their kids only want mommy for bedtime and so she has to miss important meetings, that if you have only one child you should be doing more for the PTA.
“I’m the default parent. You’re the substitute,” Fanning’s character says to her husband. “It’s never equal. Your time off is to do your own thing and to be your own person and to play basketball and see your friends. And my time off is to grocery shop, to clean the house, to cook, to do laundry. So I didn’t actually have any time off.”
Fanning says she thought portraits of women struggling to juggle so much while in a thriller was an interesting way to showcase what a lot of women experience.
“I think what it does is highlight that sometimes the men in a two-parent, man-and-woman household can just not see it, can be sort of oblivious to it because it just gets handled before they can even notice,” she says.
The narrow focus on the abduction slowly expands to show the home life of such characters as the detective in charge — played by Michael Peña — and Marissa’s brother and sister in-law — played by Daniel Monks and Abby Elliott.
“You have this one track of a thriller in which a boy is missing and that’s one tense, anxiety-inducing storyline, but in order to solve that — in that tension and anxiety and exhaustion — these family secrets from long ago or the recent past start to bubble up,” says Jake Lacy, who plays Marissa’s husband.
Elliott, whose character blames herself for a terrible childhood family accident, says her work on the series has changed her own relationships. “I’m going to look at my sister differently after this,” she says. “Was there something that I unconsciously did as a child?”
