'The Good Daughter' Review: Rose Byrne & Meghann Fahy in Peacock Drama

Peacock's "The Good Daughter," premiering Nov. 12, opens with two masked gunmen invading a small-town Georgia defense lawyer's home to avenge something, finding his wife and two daughters instead. Time Magazine said the series front-loads that formative violence and then builds "maybe a dozen more trauma dumps" across its six gloomy episodes, calling the show "trauma all the way down."

A couple of decades later, the younger sister, Charlie Quinn (Meghann Fahy), works as a lawyer alongside her father Rusty (Brendan Gleeson), a sickly, aging drinker whom Time described as "brash and crude yet fond of quoting highbrow literature." The town holds Rusty responsible for multiple real or perceived miscarriages of justice, making father and daughter pariahs. Charlie is separated from her husband (Michael Dorman) and wakes up with a phone belonging to the previous night's hookup, Jake McDorman, whom she follows to the high school where he teaches and where she spent some of her worst years as a student.

At the school, Charlie is present for a fatal shooting. Time said something does not add up about the apparent culprit, Kelly (Shayna Benardo), whom the review described as "a poor, placid girl with learning difficulties" and "the perfect client for Rusty." After several twists, Charlie's estranged sister Sam (Rose Byrne) is summoned home from a long absence and pulled into Kelly's case. Sam is also a lawyer, but her specialty is patents, and Time said she has managed her trauma by becoming "a rich, uptight, black-clad urbanite" — the opposite of her surviving family members.

The series is adapted by suspense author Karin Slaughter, described as a veteran author and rookie showrunner, from her 2017 best seller. Time praised Byrne, Gleeson and Fahy, calling Fahy "the standout here," but said there is only so much the actors can do for a script built on coincidence and contrivance. The review singled out one death happening at a convenient moment as comical, and said the show collects horrors "as though cataloging everything awful that could happen to a woman."

Time noted that the series exposes one gender's brutality to another, but called that territory "not exactly unexplored, especially in this genre." It also said real mysteries, including what keeps Rusty in the town and job that destroyed his family, are brushed aside in favor of portentous metaphors about stories and who has the power to tell or rewrite them. The review concluded that in bringing the book to television, Slaughter might have entrusted that latter task to someone else.