I recently got a subscription to Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, mainly to watch Six Nations rugby and the Olympics. But it also finally gave me a chance to watch All Her Fault, an eight-episode series about a missing child and the fathers and husbands who are useless at finding him.
All Her Fault, which premiered back in November, stars Succession’s Sarah Snook as Marissa Irvine, a Chicago mom and finance worker who arranges a playdate for her son, Milo, over text with another mom at Milo’s school. But when Marissa goes to the address that mom, Jenny Kaminski, has given her, neither Milo nor Jenny are there, and the older woman who is has no idea what Marissa is talking about. It quickly becomes clear this isn’t just a mixup; someone has kidnapped Milo. The first episode stays painfully close to the Irvine and Kaminski families as they realize the severity of the situation and their roles in it.
As someone who cannot deal with any media where a kid is upset, I was relieved that All Her Fault very quickly lets you know Milo is alive and, all things considered, having a fine time, as well as revealing the identity of the kidnapper. But this doesn’t sap the drama out of things. Instead, the rest of the show unravels the relationship between Marissa, her husband Peter (Jake Lacy), and Peter’s family, as well as the relationship between Jenny (Dakota Fanning) and her husband Richie (Thomas Cocquerel). Jenny feels responsible for what’s happened, for several reasons, and even though Richie warns her that getting involved with Marissa could be an admission of guilt, she goes against his advice to support her fellow mom.
Their growing relationship stands in contrast to their relationships with their husbands. Peter and Richie both attempt to take charge and control things, but neither is any good at it; they are both distant, incompetent fathers, despite exuding confidence and control in the rest of their lives. They cannot adequately describe what their children were wearing or provide any information about the kids’ nannies because they let their wives handle all that. But that doesn’t stop Peter from getting angry at Marissa for not doublechecking the details of the playdate, or Richie from weaseling out of caring for his and Jenny’s son even though Jenny is managing the household, her job, and the situation with Marissa. It’s important that they see themselves as active players in their families’ lives, and in the Irvines’ case in particular, this has disastrous ramifications.
While the gender politics can get a bit heavy-handed, it’s all an interesting twist on the usual familial thriller format. Jenny is trying to land a big client at her publishing job, and we see her keep literally everything together while something terrible is happening in her personal life, making presentations and managing school dropoff while still being there for Marissa. Of course no one can actually do it all; both families have nannies, which becomes another complex issue the show explores, with what it means to invite a stranger into your home to care for your kids being a vector to explore class divides and maternal expectations. The Kaminskis and the Irvines are both obscenely wealthy, and while the show never goes as hard as movies like Parasite on what it means to have “help,” it does suggest that even with all these resources at their disposal, Jenny and Marissa cannot escape the expectations society heaps on moms. This also highlights the expectations placed on nannies, and the complicated roles they find themselves in as both employees and de facto members of a family. It never goes too deep into of this, but the questions it raises gives it more depth than I expected from the show on its surface.
The plot turns more soap opera than thriller pretty quickly, but each episode does a good job of introducing some new plot twist or secret between its cast that kept me watching even if I scoffed a bit at the situation. Even when things stretched the bounds of credulity, the show’s focus on its exploration of family and gender kept it feeling grounded. There’s nothing particularly revelatory in it either as a drama or in its politics, but combining the two things makes it something intriguing and unique.
I appreciated how All Her Fault does something beyond the standard thriller and provides its own take on the division of labor within families. The flow of getting some questions answered while raising new ones kept me deciding “OK, just one more episode” until I’d watched the whole thing much faster than I meant to. I’m a single queer man with no kids, surely not the show’s intended audience, so I’d be curious to know what viewers with actual families think of it all.
