Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy Form a Twisted, Heartfelt Sisterhood in Peacock’s Mystery Thriller ‘The Good Daughter’: TV Review

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Last year, Meghann Fahy starred in “Sirens” as one half of a haunted pair of sisters. Fahy’s character resents the way her sibling has escaped the suffocating, hardscrabble world that raised them, particularly the father she’s wound up taking care of in lieu of starting her own life. But circumstances conspire to reunite the estranged pair, who proceed to hash out their differences and air old resentments over a few high-pressure days.

It appears that Fahy has a type, because her latest role in yet another streaming-native limited series matches that description to a tee. This repetition could be a worrying sign of an actor settling into a rut — except Fahy’s knack for creating lived-in, complex, deeply felt familial chemistry is such that you can’t blame her for being drawn to similar material. What she pulled off once with “House of the Dragon” breakout Milly Alcock, Fahy does again with an equally skilled screen partner in Rose Byrne. Peacock’s “The Good Daughter” isn’t always on the level of its two central performances, but their scenes together are so alive with anger, hurt and devotion it doesn’t have to be.

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In “The Good Daughter,” author Karin Slaughter’s six-episode adaptation of her own crime novel, Fahy plays Charlotte “Charlie” Quinn, a Georgia defense attorney who’s followed her father Rusty (Brendan Gleeson) into the family business. (Slaughter has script credit on every episode, while Steph Green directs the full series.) A chronic thorn in the side of the town’s conservative establishment prone to drinking, smoking and quoting Emily Dickinson, Rusty is the kind of guy who’s great to have in one’s life but tough to have as a parent. Sam’s choice to partner with her dad is an interesting trauma response to a harrowing childhood tragedy in which Rusty played no small part: a botched robbery by a client that killed Charlotte’s mother Gamma (Olivia Williams, seen frequently in flashback) — and left her sister Sam (Byrne, also an executive producer) permanently disabled.

Sam doesn’t enter the picture until the very end of the first episode, which establishes both the sorry state of Charlie’s personal life and the mystery that will bring her and Sam back into each other’s lives after a decade-long estrangement. After six months of separation from her husband Ben (Michael Dorman), a Duke Law classmate turned frequent sparring partner in the local DA’s office, Charlie impulsively hooks up with a hot bartender Huck (Jake McDorman), who turns out to be a moonlighting teacher at the local high school. When Charlie stops by his workplace to return a lost phone, their awkward banter is interrupted by gunshots. Charlie sprints toward the danger and finds a grisly scene: a track coach and a student are dead, while special-needs teenager Kelly Wilson (Shayna Benardo) is holding the gun.

Charlie’s first instinct is to record the police as they pin Kelly to the ground. A reflexive sympathy for the underdog and skepticism of authority, often against her own interest, are her paternal inheritance. Sam, too, is a lawyer, but that’s where the family resemblance ends: She lives in Manhattan, channels the competitive energy from her terminated track and field career into litigating patent claims and hasn’t spoken to either Rusty or Charlie in more than a decade. But then a phone call from an ailing Rusty brings her back to the tiny town of Pikeville for a city-slicker-comes-home story that plays like a much darker version of a Hallmark movie, starting with Sam’s reluctant agreement to represent Kelly at her arraignment.

The question of exactly what Kelly did and why drives the plot of “The Good Daughter,” and it’s clear what draws Sam to her new client, whose learning impairment leaves her vulnerable to bullying and manipulation. Sam’s own disability demands a precise physicality from Byrne: the chronic limp that forces her character to use a cane, the speech impediment that acts up when Sam’s emotional and the reduced vision that get her chastised by an old-fashioned judge for wearing tinted glasses in court. (All this on top of the Southern accent work, which non-Americans Byrne, Gleeson and Williams all take to with gusto.) “The Good Daughter” gets in some sharp observations about navigating life with a physical handicap — “Usually, the evacuation plan for disabled people is just to let them die,” Sam observes when stranded in an elevatorless basement during a fire drill — while keeping the primary focus on Sam’s psychology, a blend of compensatory aggression and repressed pain.

But the primary interests of “The Good Daughter” lie in the past. Audrey Grace Marshall and Drew Cheek are well-cast as the younger versions of Byrne and Fahy as the show keeps circling back to the scene of the crime, revealing new details in every episode. (Each chapter’s title begins “What Really Happened…”.) In the present, though, Sam and Charlie pick at one another’s wounds. Sam is furious with Charlie for, in her view, refusing to build a real life for herself; Charlie thinks Sam abandoned her and shut her out in a ruthless act of self-preservation. Whether they’re merely squabbling or fully having it out, the push-pull is riveting to watch.

“The Good Daughter” can sometimes force the bond between Sam, Charlie and Rusty with scripted bits like using the word “walnut” as an insult or an inside joke around the use of the phrase “last word.” (The definitive answer to which Quinn sister is really the title character ends up eliciting a soft groan.) And as Kelly’s case hurtles toward its conclusion, including a sickeningly topical revelation regarding an encounter with her school’s football team, information starts to come in an avalanche of exposition that threatens to overshadow the emotional core. But when Fahy and Byrne are at their peak, as they are for so much of “The Good Daughter,” such quibbles fall away. Even if certain details of “The Good Daughter” don’t have the ring of reality, its core sisterhood always does.

All six episodes of “The Good Daughter” are now streaming on Peacock.