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\n The rich white mommy drama sets its sights on the patriarchy in Sarah Snook\u2019s first live-action TV series since Succession.
\n Photo: PEACOCK\n <\/p>\n
The men in All Her Fault never utter the titular three words. But you know they\u2019re thinking them when a young boy goes missing from a playdate his mother set up (all her fault), when a husband has to rearrange his work schedule because his wife has a meeting (all her fault), and when a teen\u2019s overspending sends her boyfriend into a life of crime (all her fault). These women exist to their partners primarily as an inconvenience, and the Peacock adaptation of Andrea Mara\u2019s novel of the same name hammers home the inequity in their relationships, family dynamics, and workplace over and over again. And yet it doesn\u2019t get monotonous. Rather, All Her Fault gathers fury as it goes, particularly for anyone who would dare dismiss women as the fairer sex. And that \u201canyone\u201d \u2014 well, it\u2019s mostly the guys, because beneath the motherthriller<\/a> shenanigans, All Her Fault reveals itself to be a misandrist masterpiece.<\/p>\n Created by Megan Gallagher and starring and executive-produced by Sarah Snook in her first live-action TV role since Succession<\/a>, All Her Fault is compulsively watchable, worthy of the type of binge that carves a dent into your couch cushions. With sprinting momentum, it introduces and amplifies an overlapping series of mysteries that begins with the disappearance of the young son of a very wealthy couple, Marissa (Snook) and Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy). The inciting action is a bit convoluted: Marissa goes to pick up Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate, but the woman who answers the door has no idea who Milo is. She is not Jenny, mom of Jacob, who texted Marissa to set up the playdate, nor is she Jenny\u2019s nanny. The phone number that texted Marissa claiming to be Jenny is now out of service, and the real Jenny (Dakota Fanning) says she never sent the text. She\u2019s only hung out with Marissa once. Why would someone use her name to kidnap Milo?<\/p>\n All Her Fault lays out this information at a rapid clip in the premiere, using detectives Alcaras (Michael Pe\u00f1a) and Greco (Johnny Carr) to sort through the details and bring other characters into the mix: Peter\u2019s younger sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), a recovering drug addict with a persecution complex; Peter\u2019s younger brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), who uses a cane and lives in Peter and Marissa\u2019s guest house; and Marissa\u2019s business partner, Colin (Jay Ellis), who steps up to run their wealth-management firm after Marissa\u2019s family life explodes. Each has their own secrets, of course. But All Her Fault\u2019s visceral entertainment value is driven less by the reveals of these characters\u2019 hidden motivations than the unexpected friendship that grows between Marissa and Jenny, who are discouraged by their husbands from communicating after Milo disappears but find in each other not just confidantes but allies.<\/p>\n Marissa and Jenny are very different women with very similar problems. Fanning is in the clipped-and-icy mode she recently perfected in Ripley<\/a> and The Perfect Couple<\/a>, all placid smiles and unbroken eye contact, while Snook keeps inventing new ways to manipulate her face into expressions of adrift, devastated distress. (Snook\u2019s eyebrows are so raised at each new revelation they sometimes seem as if they\u2019ll levitate off her face.) The two actresses\u2019 contrasting energies gel when they find common ground in the increasingly curtailed nature of their lives. Even as they meet their professional goals and find joy in raising children, something\u2019s missing. A husband who acts like an adult, perhaps? A scene in which Marissa and Jenny drink wine while hiding in the bathroom during a school fundraiser has that chummy feminine quality that makes their friendship so familiar and this genre such a comfort, even as its ultrarich, ultrawhite characters navigate unrelatable scenarios, like tending to an Olympic-size pool or realizing the nanny\u2019s been lying to you for months. Although Marissa Irvine is a far more conventionally likable character than Succession\u2019s Shiv Roy<\/a>, it\u2019s fun to see Snook allude to her work as Waystar Royco\u2019s most complicit woman, peppering little \u201cyeah\u201ds and \u201chey\u201ds at the end of her sentences that transform innocuous lines into conversational challenges. Snook\u2019s talent is playing women who seem like the only thing preventing them from falling apart is their gritted teeth, and Marissa is another well-rounded entry in that canon.<\/p>\n Zoom out on the past year\u2019s mountain of TV, and All Her Fault is one pebble in a cairn of series positioning their female characters against abusive lovers or uniting them against a common enemy. (Bad Sisters<\/a>, Sirens<\/a>, The Better Sister<\/a>, and The Hunting Wives<\/a> qualify here.) All Her Fault puts its own twist on that formula by dissecting Marissa and Jenny\u2019s comparably frustrating marriages: how both husbands call their wives \u201camazing\u201d whenever the women make sacrifices the men would never consider making, or how their domestic labor never ends, despite the means to pay for assistance, thanks to their husbands\u2019 talent for removing themselves from things like dinner planning and schedule coordination. All Her Fault allows the two women to lament this normalized condescension and consider whether they\u2019ve shrunk themselves in order to please their small men, then renders their husbands so selfish and negligent viewers can\u2019t help but root for their riotous downfalls. (Jenny\u2019s husband sabotages her meeting with an important client because he can\u2019t figure out how to put their son to bed. Jail.) Once Marissa and Jenny finally confront them, All Her Fault revels in the husbands\u2019 evisceration and their wives\u2019 lack of guilt. \u201cAll her fault,\u201d then, takes on another meaning: Marissa and Jenny\u2019s payback is their responsibility, but the surprise of the series is their complete lack of remorse, how brusquely they wash their hands and move on, eyes open and resolve set.<\/p>\n Not all the men in All Her Fault are terrible. Pe\u00f1a does well playing against type as Alcaras, who intuits that Marissa and Jenny\u2019s bond is based on more than just the shock of Milo\u2019s disappearance. Of the men who are terrible, Lacy<\/a> is exceptionally hatable as Peter, a less bro-y spin on his character from The White Lotus<\/a>. An early scene when Peter asks Marissa why she didn\u2019t double-check any of the details of Milo\u2019s playdate, and Alcaras turns the question around on Peter as Milo\u2019s other parent, has a delicious let-them-fight charge. But really, the men in All Her Fault are ancillary, little more than obstructions yelling for attention, figures whose fall from grace delivers operatic melodrama before the show settles into a story about the dignity women can find through determining their own identities as individuals, rather than through the magnanimous terms like team or partners used in modern marriage. All Her Fault\u2019s short-term gratification is in those big tell-off scenes, the moments Marissa and Jenny get to rip apart men who refuse to take any ownership over their actions. Its larger contribution to this specific subgenre, though, is the way it elevates and celebrates women who choose to reject the expectations of house-baby-mommy heternormative society. Who could blame them?<\/p>\n