The Good Daughter: Rose Byrne’s Legal Thriller Slips Toward Farce

By Grace Kim

Sky Atlantic broadcasts The Good Daughter at 9pm on Thursday 12 November, with Rose Byrne starring as a wealthy New York lawyer pulled into a family crisis after a school shooting.

Karin Slaughter wrote the series and adapted her own novel into a paperback thriller—a glossy, plot-led story built around masked intruders, gun violence and concealed connections. The show is also extremely preposterous. Its people remain astonishingly beautiful while trauma supplies the shocks.

That makes the choice a strange one for Byrne at this point in her career. On Apple TV’s Platonic, her emotional nuance and flawless slapstick hold the comedy together. Earlier this year, she won a Golden Globe and received an Oscar nomination for her “wired, frayed” lead performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Byrne should be able to make almost anything she wants, which makes this glossy register look oddly modest.

The series occupies David E Kelley and Harlan Coben territory, with the heightened look of Nicole Kidman in a silly wig. My verdict was blunt: “It is one of the most hilariously frontloaded things I have ever seen.”

• In the first scene, two young girls watch masked intruders shoot their mother in the face.
• The second scene reveals the shooting as a flashback in Meghann Fahy’s memory; Fahy plays Byrne’s sister.
• In the third, Fahy walks in on a school shooting, and police beat her.

That density creates a real risk of turning The Good Daughter into trauma-based Mr Bean. The opening invites the thought that Fahy will blunder from catastrophe to catastrophe: perhaps she will land in a bear trap, fall down some stairs and notice a stain that recalls her grandmother’s death. The show only flirts with that pattern. It does not sustain it, though the distance is slight.

Once the opening energy burns off, the series settles into a good version of what it is. Fahy is a lawyer, and her father, Brendan Gleeson, is also a lawyer. After the school shooting, Byrne joins them as a third lawyer. Fahy and Gleeson are scrappy, backwoods lawyers; Byrne is rich and successful in New York. Expensive cars and blueprints viewed on an iPad mark her world, as if she has arrived from the future.

The plot turns on the family’s effort to process the matriarch’s violent death and the shooting’s reach into the wider community. The first strand works better. Fahy, a highlight of The White Lotus’ second season, holds her own against Byrne. Their relationship stays warm but occasionally fractious, and the best scenes suspend the plot for character work rather than add another twist.

One example is a madcap game of Scrabble in which the sisters try to shut a coffin lid. It is strange, funny and revealing of their bond. The sequence encourages the hope that Byrne and Fahy will work together again, ideally on something livelier that requires fewer mournful looks into the middle distance.

The comparison with Sherwood is harder to shake, and a UK viewer may feel spoiled by it. In plot terms, little separates The Good Daughter from that series. Sherwood, however, embeds its soap opera in boiling political anger and moral outrage. This show offers none of that heat. My description is equally blunt: “It’s primped, glossed and diluted to be palatable to the biggest possible audience.”

What does the polished format change for Byrne?

It changes the likely scale of Byrne’s audience more than the quality of her performance. Apple TV shows and critically praised independent productions are not known for mass viewership, while The Good Daughter has the polish to attract it. That may explain the otherwise illogical choice for an actor in a hot streak: the series could become the most-watched thing Byrne has made in years.

That calculation does not rescue every decision. The show trades Sherwood’s moral friction for accessibility, and its extreme opening can make the later restraint feel cautious. Yet Fahy and Byrne make the familial material convincing, and their pairing creates something more specific than the generic trauma plot.

If the series leads to another Fahy-Byrne partnership, the next project should be livelier and less reliant on mournful middle-distance stares. Their chemistry is the most persuasive case for what follows.