You’d have to screw up your eyes to find anything substantially the matter with “The Good Daughter,” a solid limited series premiering Thursday on Peacock. Adapted by Karin Slaughter (author of the books on which “Will Trent” is based), from her own 2017 novel, it’s a murder mystery, a legal drama, a cold case story, a family drama, a small-town soap opera, and in some ways, what they used to call a women’s picture, though not a sentimental one.
Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy play estranged sisters warily reunited in their hometown of Pikeville, Ga. (Points for filming in Georgia.) Charlie (Fahy) is a simple country lawyer, working with her flamboyant, puckish father Rusty Quinn (Brendan Gleeson), who has a habit of popping a red clown nose onto his own and a bent for literary quotation and homilies along the lines of “Never kick a turd on a hot day.” They’re “the only defense lawyers in town who didn’t roll over for the cops,” which you might imagine would make them very popular, but you would be wrong. (Harper Steele, Will Ferrell’s real-life friend from “Will & Harper,” plays their more-than-a-secretary, Lenore.)
Charlie’s older sister, Sam (Byrne), is a New York City patent attorney with the features of an Art Deco figurine; she charges $2,000 an hour, making the viewer question his life choices. Sam is recalled to Pikeville at the end of the first episode by a chainsmoking Rusty, who has been stabbed, telling her in a voicemail, “Your sister needs you.”
Something traumatic happened in the past to the family and something happens around them in the present, and you may well suppose that they are somehow related, and maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. In the past-set scenes — there is a lot of flashing back — two masked gunmen enter the Quinns’ house, leaving mother Gamma (Olivia Willams) dead and the girls chased through the forest. (What happens next and why will be revealed bit by bit over the course of the six-episode series.)
In the present day, Charlie is at her old high school, where she had gone to retrieve her cellphone from teacher and one-night stand Mason Huckabee (Jake McDorman), when Kelly Wilson (Shayna Benardo, excellent), an 18-year-old high school freshman with learning disabilities, shoots or seems to shoot the school principal and, in the bargain, a 7-year-old girl. Mason attempts to save the victims, and Charlie is coldcocked by a policeman.
In the aftermath of their shared trauma, Charlie and Sam have grown into different brands of tough cookie, which doesn’t bode well for their getting along. Charlie, who might be the good daughter of the title as she’s stuck by her father, is scrappy and fundamentally sunny; she has a turtle and a bunny and shares a dog with assistant district attorney Ben Bernard (Michael Dorman), from whom she’s “separated technically but so very, very married.” Sam, who walks with a cane sometimes, is cool and dark and stylish, in an Anna Wintour mode. “Lookee here, Todd, we got Samantha Quinn all … the … way .. from … New York City,” says the local DA Kenny Coin (Jason Davis), unless it’s his brother, the sheriff Keith Coin (Jayson Warner Smith); my notes are unclear, but they’re essentially a single cartoon character.
That gets us to the end of Episode 1, and in the remaining five there’ll be twists and turns, loads of new and old antagonistic business unpacked and wrong trees barked up. Also: revelations! Besides the Quinns, there are other families with families’ histories to keep straight; you may want to keep a pencil handy. The series can be confusing to the point of just waiting until it’s all explained at the end, though as I find this to be the case with many mysteries, that may be partly on me. But director Steph Green understands that the plot is not as important as the people, and she keeps her camera trained on Byrne and Fahy, letting them go and filling the screen with their interesting faces, and that is very satisfying.
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