Stream It Or Skip It?

Is there a genre of show that you’re just completely tired of? Maybe you don’t like watching mocumentaries anymore, or medical shows just make you roll your eyes. For us, it’s two genres: Kidnapping thrillers and rich-people-being-awful dramas. A new Peacock series has both of these tiresome genres in one show!

Opening Shot: A doorbell rings and a door opens. Marissa Irvine (Sarah Snook) is there to pick up her 5-year-old son Milo (Duke McCloud).

The Gist: One problem: The woman who answered the door has no idea who Milo is. According to Marissa, Milo was at the house of Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning) to have a playdate with her son Jacob (Tayden Jax Ryan). She shows the woman the texts and the address. The address is right, but it’s not Jenny’s house.

As the woman kindly helps Marissa call around to see where Milo might be, including Jenny, who’s working in downtown Chicago, it dawns on Marissa that Milo has been taken. She’s driven home and runs through the massive house looking for Milo, and checks the guest house, where her brother-in-law Brian (Daniel Monks) lives. When she gets home she runs to her husband Peter (Jake Lacy) and embraces him sobbing.

As patrol officers question the Irvines, Marissa reveals that she barely knew Jenny, having met her at a social for parents from Milo’s new school about ten days prior. She beats herself up for not checking on the number where the texts about the playdate came from.

As the hours tick by, Marissa’s friend and business partner Colin Dobbs (Jay Ellis) and Peter’s sister Lia (Abby Elliott) arrive for support. Suspicion briefly falls on the family’s nanny, Ana Garcia (Kartiah Vergara). But then Detectives Alcaras (Michael Peña) and Greco (Johnny Carr) tell the Irvines that Milo was picked up from school by Carrie Finch (Sophia Lillis), whom Jenny and her husband Richie (Thomas Cocquerel) hired as a nanny a few months prior.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Megan Gallagher and based on the novel of the same name by Andrea Mara, All Her Fault is a cross between kidnapping dramas like The Stolen Girl and rich-people-with-secrets dramas like The Perfect Couple.

Our Take: There is nothing inherently wrong with All Her Fault. It’s dramatic in all the right places, and the episodes move along well. Snook displays her usual ability to easily show the layers of emotion that someone in Marissa would be in, and Fanning and the rest of the cast are very watchable in their roles.

But for most of the episode, it feels like a standard-grade kidnapping thriller, where the victim’s family tries to figure out who did it, often getting more information than the police can. But then when we get to the end of the episode, where we jump ahead 27 days and see Dets. Alcaras and Greco staring at screens with everyone’s pictures on it, we realize this is also going to be a “wealthy family with secrets” drama, and we felt even more “meh” about the whole thing.

This may be just our fatigue with both of the genres we cited above. But this is one of the cases where no amount of stellar acting makes us care about how the story turns out. Everyone could be involved in this, or no one could be involved. There’s going to be a lot of shots of massive houses with well-appointed kitchens and people driving expensive cars. There’s going to be plot twists and scenes where people align with each other, like Marissa does with Jenny when she introduces her to the cops and her family as “my friend.” There’s also going to be moments when those alliances are tested or torn apart.

But for some reason, we just can’t muster enough interest to find out about these twists and turns. Perhaps we’ve seen too many of these shows (most of which star Nicole Kidman, so at least All Her Fault is unique in that it doesn’t star the Oscar winner) lately, or perhaps we’ve gotten too many real-life examples of rich people being awful, but there was nothing about the first episode — even Sarah Snook! — that made us want to keep watching this series.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: “I honestly didn’t see this coming. These nice people. Killing each other,” Alcaras says to Greco.

Sleeper Star: Is it wrong to wonder if Abby Elliott’s Lia lives in the same Chicago universe as her The Bear character Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto?

Most Pilot-y Line: In a flashback, Ana looks at Milo longingly and says to Carrie, “He’s perfect.” Ugh. It’s either a bad red herring or a bad bit of foreshadowing. Either way, it’s bad.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Again, there’s nothing actually wrong with All Her Fault. But we’re just so tired of these kinds of thrillers that we just don’t have the energy to spare watching rich people in nice kitchens trying to keep their secrets from getting out.

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Where To Watch All Her Fault

Peacock currently offers two subscription types: Premium with ads and Premium Plus ad-free. Peacock Premium costs $10.99/month, while Premium Plus costs $16.99/month.

You can save a bit by subscribing to one of Peacock’s annual plans, which give you 12 months for the price of 10. These cost either $109.99 with ads or $169.99 without ads.

Peacock Premium Plus is also available to subscribe to via Prime Video with a seven-day free trial that you can’t get by subscribing directly on Peacock.

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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.