BAD GIRLS

Award-Worthy Stars Can’t Save Year’s Most Unwatchable Show

Rose Byrne stars in Peacock’s six-part melodrama about sisterhood and misogyny, “The Good Daughter.”

Brendan Gleeson’s rural Georgia lawyer Rusty likes to amuse (and annoy) his children by donning a big red nose—a fitting habit given that The Good Daughter is a clown show.

Karin Slaughter’s six-part adaptation of her own novel (Nov. 12, Peacock) is the dreariest kind of beach read, coloring its estranged-siblings drama with an avalanche of murder-mystery intrigue, sexual-assault trauma, and folksy humor and bathos.

A collection of charm-free clichés that have been clumsily knitted together into a tapestry of female victimhood, survival, and solidarity, The Good Daughter is a graceless and affected dud that stars Rose Byrne (in the follow-up to her Oscar-nominated turn in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) and Emmy nominee Meghann Fahy (The White Lotus) are powerless to salvage.

Neither daughter is totally good in The Good Daughter, and their story is even worse, with origins dating back to a seismic tragedy decades earlier. In the house to which they’ve recently moved in the aftermath of their prior home burning to the ground, teenagers Sam (Audrey Grace Marshall) and Charlie (Drew Cheek) watch as masked intruders fatally blast their mom Gamma (Olivia Williams)—owner of the series’ most groan-worthy name—with a shotgun.

There’s more to this slaying than it initially appears, and Slaughter thus keeps returning to it. Her plotting, though, is hopelessly clunky, full of key details that are incessantly mentioned but never dramatized, and a host of crucial characters who are repeatedly referred to by name and yet never (or rarely) seen on-screen—meaning that much of the action hinges on events and individuals the show doesn’t actually depict.

The Good Daughter is thus a convoluted and perpetually undercooked stew, and keeping its particulars straight is a chore. What is clear, however, is that in the present, Charlie (Fahy) is a mess who wakes up on her couch to discover that she accidentally switched phones with Mason (Jake McDorman), the hunky bartender and high school teacher with whom she had a regrettable one-night stand.

Before meeting with Mason, Charlie chats with the raccoon that inexplicably frequents her rural domicile. This makes her a lot like her eccentric pop, a famed defense lawyer whose dedication to sticking up for the little guy—in a town run by the evil hillbilly Coin and Culpepper clans—is as staunch as his grandiloquent fondness for quoting Flannery O’Connor, Euripides, and Emily Dickinson.

Things go sideways when, while at the school, a shooting takes place involving student Kelly Wilson (Shayna Benardo), whom Charlie and Mason discover has killed the school principal as well as a younger classmate. Horror, fury, and police brutality conspire to escalate this crisis, and it’s not long before Charlie is working with her dad to help represent Kelly, who’s mentally challenged and whose family resides in the same backwoods enclave as the Culpepper clan that murdered Charlie’s mom. C

omplicating matters, Charlie is unhappy about her separation from her assistant district attorney husband Ben (Michael Dorman), and she’s soon covering up for Mason, who took the murder weapon from the scene for reasons that don’t seem totally altruistic.

Before its premiere is finished, The Good Daughter reveals that Sam was almost fatally wounded by her mom’s killer and is now a big-city lawyer (played by Byrne) who, because of her childhood injuries, has wonky vision and sometimes requires a cane to walk. Called home by her father to help her sister, Sam immediately clashes with Charlie over long-ago resentments, and Slaughter’s series sustains their friction by indulging in a tiresome screenwriting contrivance: dragging out conflicts by having characters refuse to tell each other the very information that would fix their difficult situation.

Rather than communicating, they simply snipe in writerly tête-à-têtes, and compounding that artificiality is every moment with Lenore (Will & Harper’s Harper Steele), Rusty’s trusty assistant, whose sole purpose is to add additional dollops of corny homespun flavor.

In last year’s Sirens, Fahy played a woman who couldn’t get her life together, acted out in unwise sexual ways, and was mad at her sister. In The Good Daughter, she does likewise, albeit to diminishing returns. The familiarity of the performance makes it unconvincing, and Byrne isn’t more compelling as the equally hurt and angry Sam. Miserable about returning to her childhood stomping grounds, Sam invariably sticks around to aid her father and sister’s legal cause because she suspects Kelly isn’t totally guilty. Byrne wears nice clothes and holds her nose high in the air to distinguish Sam from the disheveled, fiery Charlie, but as with Fahy, she can’t make her protagonist believable.

The Good Daughter’s primary narrative inevitably intertwines with Sam and Charlie’s adolescent upheaval and knotty feelings about their crusader paterfamilias, whom Gleeson embodies as an aggravatingly idiosyncratic and noble big fish in a small pond. From recurring literary citations and down-home colloquialisms to frank dirty talk, the series is awash in strained colorfulness. It’s also consumed by rape, which proves the link between its multiple threads.

Throw in a few powerful white southern male authority figures who smugly attempt to control and belittle their female counterparts, and what you get is an over-the-top and schematic portrait of ubiquitous misogyny and the (justifiable) rage it begets—although, as befitting the show’s phoniness, this ugly sexism doesn’t extend to the transgender Lenore, who suffers not a single sidelong glance (much less any overt violence) in her conservative-minded native town.

The Good Daughter has no subtlety and even less nimbleness. Director Steph Green weaves soft-focus, dewy-eyed flashbacks into every third scene, and the finale’s revelations are at once implausible and semi-incomprehensible. It’s a case of both being too much and not enough, including with regard to the leads’ performances. Fahy and Byrne don’t seem related and, especially in the former’s case, go overboard with testy histrionics. Moreover, their rapport grows less credible as the material nears its end—a fatal problem, given that Slaughter telegraphs that her saga will conclude with heartwarming sisterly rapprochement.

The Good Daughter mires itself in grief over lost parents, sibling disaffection, and the unthinkable cruelty men commit against women, making it a practical compendium of women’s-lit concerns. Unfortunately, poor writing, overwrought direction, and heightened performances undermine everything it strives to say.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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