‘The Good Daughter’ Review: Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy in Peacock Drama

We all have our television pet peeves, and for me, the warning signs abound in Peacock’s new limited series, The good girl.

Adapted by Karin Slaughter from her book of the same name, The good girl is interchangeable, in terms of title, plot or structure, with a dozen recent limited series – the most visible being Amazon’s. The best sister and Netflix His and hers.

It’s a story set and filmed in the Deep South, but its central cast is populated by actors from Australia, Ireland, Massachusetts, and virtually everywhere other than the Deep South, leading to a succotash of colorful and, to put it politely, inconsistent accents.

And it’s a story sparked by a school shooting and pushed by multiple instances of sexual violence, all supporting a barely mysterious mystery — at least until the characters all sit down to explain everything in a series of weakly staged monologues.

That The good girl is so full of tropes that I find tedious or boring and yet ends up being compulsively entertaining is a tribute to Slaughter’s gift for characterization and dialogue, to the confident hand of series director Steph Green, and especially to the engaged, emotionally exposed, and often funny performances of leads Meghann Fahy, Rose Byrne, and Brendan Gleeson.

The good girl begins with a double dose of trauma, the better to eliminate disgusted viewers.

First, in a flashback, devoted sisters Sam (Audrey Grace Marshall) and Charlie (Drew Cheek) witness a horrific act of violence perpetrated against their beloved mother (Olivia Williams’ Gamma), perhaps the latest retaliation against their father (Gleeson’s Rusty), a defense attorney prone to rubbing people the wrong way.

Their lives will never be the same again.

Move to the present. Charlie (Fahy) grew up following in her father’s footsteps, working in his rundown office in the same Georgia town populated by people who still hate him and don’t feel too nice towards her. She’s separated from her husband Ben (Michael Dorman, endearing and normal in a series populated with broad portrayals) and makes various self-destructive choices, including a one-night stand with Huck (Jake McDorman), whose ponytail and skin let you know it’s a bad idea.

Charlie and Huck accidentally exchange phones, leading him to discover that he is a high school teacher. In the process of returning his phone, she is present when Kelly (Shayna Benardo, an impressive force) shows up and shoots and kills the well-liked principal and a freshman.

Rusty, who has a bad cough and a history of heart problems, and who likes to wear – for reasons that are never explained – a red clown nose, shows up to represent Kelly, whose cognitive problems haven’t stopped local power brokers from considering the death penalty.

Sensing that everything is going wrong, Rusty also calls his eldest daughter Sam (Byrne), now a patent attorney in New York and left with a permanent limp and partial blindness resulting from the incident with her mother. Sam hasn’t seen or spoken to Charlie in 10 years, but she soon finds herself in Pikeville, caught up in the mystery of the shooting, as well as several other mysteries from her family’s past.

If we just look at the bones of the series, The good girl is beyond rudimentary, with a crime in the present and a crime in the past that, by sheer coincidence, are directly linked. The story can barely decide which twists and turns are meant to be surprising and, as a result, nothing is really “guessable” or revelatory.

Instead, The good girl works best as a soiled – albeit confusingly whitewashed – version of To kill a mockingbirdwith Rusty as a lawyer doing noble things in an unsavory way, constantly looking like he’s asleep at his desk with a bottle in hand, eschewing the seersucker and moral rectitude of Atticus Finch. He resists threats from his opponents that are violent and bloody rather than menacing and insinuated, investigating cases in which rape and persecution of the disabled and the poor are apparent on the surface rather than buried in euphemisms. It almost certainly works better on the page than on screen, where we’ve seen too many versions of these generic rednecks in their generic pickups and these shuffling, shadowy lawmen to take them seriously.

Green and the series’ filmmakers are able to weave themselves into the dilapidated streets of Pikeville and take us into the “scream,” capturing this community within a community. But when every lead actor speaks as if the closest thing to a scream is a quick drive-by during rehearsal, verisimilitude suffers.

What holds the series together is Slaughter’s understanding of the characters and their relationships. When Sam, Charlie, and Rusty speak, it’s in a vernacular that mixes jokes, deeply felt family history, snotty literary references (lots of Flannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson), fun, unpretentious pop culture references (from Die hard has Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and an awareness of how to hurt or heal the people they know best. Byrne, Fahy and Gleeson don’t speak as if they’re from the same place, but the energy between them gives the show its energy and authenticity.

Of course, Fahy does a variation on her bad sister character from Netflix. Mermaidsbut she’s great at playing those open damage books.

Much of Byrne’s performance consists of interpretations of disability, but she makes those notes of artificiality pay off. Everything Sam does is a simulation; her dress, hair, and speech are defined in opposition to the place she left behind and hoped to never return to, with aspects of her natural self returning as she spends more time in Pikeville.

It’s easy to buy them as sisters, both in the parts that evoke pain and those where they bicker with humor. Plus, it’s easy to see the consequences of trauma and time, as Byrne and Fahy are well matched with Marshall and Cheek.

Gleeson isn’t as convincing in the flashback segments, and his southern intonations reminded me of someone I couldn’t quite place, but he makes Rusty naughty and flawed.

Like actors, the characters occupy roles – the city mouse, the bad girl, the country lawyer – but when they are together, they can be themselves. It’s a nice touch that one of the few characters who doesn’t have a public role to play, Lenore, Rusty’s longtime assistant, is played by Harper Steele – you know her from the documentary. Will and Harper – who is not an actor and who does not seem as studied but soft and natural.

For five episodes, Green keeps the flow between past and present smooth and is able to modulate most of the distressing parts of the story so that they feel tense but not exploitative. Too bad the finale collapses under the weight of all its excessive explanations.

I never really cared about who was doing what and why, but Fahy, Byrne, and Gleeson at least made me care about the people these things were happening to.