Peacock released all six episodes of The Good Daughter on Thursday, Nov. 12. Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy play sisters who grew up in the same Georgia house, survived the same attack and have spent much of their adult lives apart. When violence hits their hometown again, the sisters have to decide how much of their own history they can tell each other.
Karin Slaughter adapted her 2017 novel and wrote all six episodes, her first television scripts. Steph Green directed the limited series. Peacock lists the episodes at about an hour each, so the full story runs roughly six hours. The streaming service’s release guide confirms that the complete series is available in the U.S. for its first weekend, with no weekly episode schedule to keep track of.
The streaming service has an official trailer that introduces the sisters and their hometown.
The story moves between two timelines
Fahy plays Charlotte Quinn, who goes by Charlie and works as a defense lawyer in Pikeville, Georgia, the town where she grew up. Byrne plays Samantha Quinn, or Sam, who practices patent law in New York. Brendan Gleeson plays their father, Rusty, a defense attorney who brings Sam home after the new violence in Pikeville. The series shifts between the sisters’ lives now and the attack they survived more than two decades earlier.
That division between the two sisters is also in the original novel. Charlie stayed close to the people who remember the night that tore the family apart. Sam built a life far away. In the series, those different careers and homes give the actors two ways into the same family history. The premise sets up a mystery about what happened in Pikeville and a family story about what the sisters remember.
Pikeville is fictional. The Georgia locations are real.
The production filmed in Georgia, where Slaughter grew up and where she sets much of her fiction. She helped the creative team find the places that would inform the look of Pikeville. Pikeville drew loosely on Blue Ridge, and the creative team scouted the north Georgia town and surrounding area with Slaughter. That gives the adaptation an actual Appalachian setting for the places the book invents. The production used the area’s dense woods as part of the visual distinction between the sisters’ present and the earlier events the show returns to.
Slaughter lists The Good Daughter among her standalone novels. Readers can start with the book without picking up one of her detective series first.
