By Roxana Hadadi, a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture. She is a juror for the Peabody Awards.

The rich white mommy drama sets its sights on the patriarchy in Sarah Snook’s first live-action TV series since Succession. Photo: PEACOCK

The men in* All Her Fault* never utter the titular three words. But you know they’re thinking them when a young boy goes missing from a playdate his mother set up (all her fault), when a husband has to rearrange his work schedule because his wife has a meeting (all her fault), and when a teen’s overspending sends her boyfriend into a life of crime (all her fault). These women exist to their partners primarily as an inconvenience, and the Peacock adaptation of Andrea Mara’s novel of the same name hammers home the inequity in their relationships, family dynamics, and workplace over and over again. And yet it doesn’t get monotonous. Rather, *All Her Fault *gathers fury as it goes, particularly for anyone who would dare dismiss women as the fairer sex. And that “anyone” — well, it’s mostly the guys, because beneath the motherthriller shenanigans, *All Her Fault *reveals itself to be a misandrist masterpiece.

Created by Megan Gallagher and starring and executive-produced by Sarah Snook in her first live-action TV role since Succession, All Her Fault is compulsively watchable, worthy of the type of binge that carves a dent into your couch cushions. With sprinting momentum, it introduces and amplifies an overlapping series of mysteries that begins with the disappearance of the young son of a very wealthy couple, Marissa (Snook) and Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy). The inciting action is a bit convoluted: Marissa goes to pick up Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate, but the woman who answers the door has no idea who Milo is. She is not Jenny, mom of Jacob, who texted Marissa to set up the playdate, nor is she Jenny’s nanny. The phone number that texted Marissa claiming to be Jenny is now out of service, and the real Jenny (Dakota Fanning) says she never sent the text. She’s only hung out with Marissa once. Why would someone use her name to kidnap Milo?

All Her Fault lays out this information at a rapid clip in the premiere, using detectives Alcaras (Michael Peña) and Greco (Johnny Carr) to sort through the details and bring other characters into the mix: Peter’s younger sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), a recovering drug addict with a persecution complex; Peter’s younger brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), who uses a cane and lives in Peter and Marissa’s guest house; and Marissa’s business partner, Colin (Jay Ellis), who steps up to run their wealth-management firm after Marissa’s family life explodes. Each has their own secrets, of course. But All Her Fault’s visceral entertainment value is driven less by the reveals of these characters’ hidden motivations than the unexpected friendship that grows between Marissa and Jenny, who are discouraged by their husbands from communicating after Milo disappears but find in each other not just confidantes but allies.

Marissa and Jenny are very different women with very similar problems. Fanning is in the clipped-and-icy mode she recently perfected in Ripley and The Perfect Couple, all placid smiles and unbroken eye contact, while Snook keeps inventing new ways to manipulate her face into expressions of adrift, devastated distress. (Snook’s eyebrows are so raised at each new revelation they sometimes seem as if they’ll levitate off her face.) The two actresses’ contrasting energies gel when they find common ground in the increasingly curtailed nature of their lives. Even as they meet their professional goals and find joy in raising children, something’s missing. A husband who acts like an adult, perhaps? A scene in which Marissa and Jenny drink wine while hiding in the bathroom during a school fundraiser has that chummy feminine quality that makes their friendship so familiar and this genre such a comfort, even as its ultrarich, ultrawhite characters navigate unrelatable scenarios, like tending to an Olympic-size pool or realizing the nanny’s been lying to you for months. Although Marissa Irvine is a far more conventionally likable character than Succession’s Shiv Roy, it’s fun to see Snook allude to her work as Waystar Royco’s most complicit woman, peppering little “yeah”s and “hey”s at the end of her sentences that transform innocuous lines into conversational challenges. Snook’s talent is playing women who seem like the only thing preventing them from falling apart is their gritted teeth, and Marissa is another well-rounded entry in that canon.

Zoom out on the past year’s mountain of TV, and *All Her Fault *is one pebble in a cairn of series positioning their female characters against abusive lovers or uniting them against a common enemy. (Bad Sisters, Sirens, The Better Sister, and The Hunting Wives qualify here.) All Her Fault puts its own twist on that formula by dissecting Marissa and Jenny’s comparably frustrating marriages: how both husbands call their wives “amazing” whenever the women make sacrifices the men would never consider making, or how their domestic labor never ends, despite the means to pay for assistance, thanks to their husbands’ talent for removing themselves from things like dinner planning and schedule coordination. All Her Fault allows the two women to lament this normalized condescension and consider whether they’ve shrunk themselves in order to please their small men, then renders their husbands so selfish and negligent viewers can’t help but root for their riotous downfalls. (Jenny’s husband sabotages her meeting with an important client because he can’t figure out how to put their son to bed. Jail.) Once Marissa and Jenny finally confront them, All Her Fault revels in the husbands’ evisceration and their wives’ lack of guilt. “All her fault,” then, takes on another meaning: Marissa and Jenny’s payback is their responsibility, but the surprise of the series is their complete lack of remorse, how brusquely they wash their hands and move on, eyes open and resolve set.

Not all the men in All Her Fault are terrible. Peña does well playing against type as Alcaras, who intuits that Marissa and Jenny’s bond is based on more than just the shock of Milo’s disappearance. Of the men who are terrible, Lacy is exceptionally hatable as Peter, a less bro-y spin on his character from The White Lotus. An early scene when Peter asks Marissa why she didn’t double-check any of the details of Milo’s playdate, and Alcaras turns the question around on Peter as Milo’s other parent, has a delicious let-them-fight* *charge. But really, the men in All Her Fault are ancillary, little more than obstructions yelling for attention, figures whose fall from grace delivers operatic melodrama before the show settles into a story about the dignity women can find through determining their own identities as individuals, rather than through the magnanimous terms like team or partners used in modern marriage. All Her Fault’s short-term gratification is in those big tell-off scenes, the moments Marissa and Jenny get to rip apart men who refuse to take any ownership over their actions. Its larger contribution to this specific subgenre, though, is the way it elevates and celebrates women who choose to reject the expectations of house-baby-mommy heternormative society. Who could blame them?

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All Her Fault Is a Misandrist Masterpiece