Peacock‘s buzzworthy new limited series, All Her Fault, is an intense, twisting tale that follows self-made wealth manager Marissa Irvine (Sarah Snook) as she goes to pick up her 5-year-old son, Milo (Duke McCloud), after a playdate, only to find that she’s been given a fake address, and her child is nowhere to be found.
Confronted with every parent’s greatest nightmare, Marissa and her husband, Peter (Jake Lacy) launch a desperate search for their son, aided by Marissa’s new friend, fellow mother Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning), as well as the case’s lead investigator, Detective Alcaras (Michael Peña). But the deeper they all dig, the more dark secrets they uncover, ultimately unraveling the Irvines’ image as a perfect little family, and significantly impacting the lives of all involved.
Sophia Lillis, Abby Elliott, Jay Ellis, Daniel Monks, Melanie Vallejo, Thomas Cocquerel, and Laura Bent round out this star-studded cast that expertly delivers heavy themes and engrossing drama over the course of the mystery thriller series’s 8-episode run. But were all of their characters drawn from real-life inspiration? And was the story itself inspired by true events?
Here’s everything you need to know about the facts and fiction behind All Her Fault.
Photo: Peacock
Is All Her Fault on Peacock Based on a True Story?
Sort of! While All Her Fault is not technically based on any true crime story, the Peacock Original series does draw loose inspiration from a bit of reality.
All Her Fault is an adaptation of Andrea Mara’s 2021 book of the same name, and while her published work is a piece of fiction, the driving force of the story is inspired by an actual incident from Mara’s life. In a YouTube video introducing the book, the Irish author shares that “the book was based on a real-life event whereby I went to collect my daughter from a playdate and found myself standing outside an unoccupied house.”
Luckily, a neighbor was quick to quell Mara’s panic by informing her of the family’s recent move to a new home, making her realize that she was just dealing with an outdated address rather than a full-scale kidnapping or deadly mystery. “It all ended very, very quickly. Much more quickly than it does for Marissa in the book.”
So, while All Her Fault is based on the terror that Mara felt when confronted with this empty, unfamiliar home where she thought her child would be, the similarities between the show and life diverge from there, with the former going deep into a dark imagining of any parent or guardian’s worst-case scenario. Additionally, Mara’s book and Peacock’s series share some differences, as the show attempts to delve even further into the immense pressure, expectations, and finger-pointing that often come with motherhood, the shocking lengths a mother can go to for her child’s sake, and what it might take for a person to be pushed to commit a grave act they can’t come back from.
Watch All Her Fault now on Peacock.