Escapist Routes #36

We’re a bit off-format this week, because due to outside commitments and work travel, we only watched one TV series. Sorry, The Morning Show, apologies, Down Cemetery Road. I haven’t even looked at Pluribus yet.

(Is this a safe space to admit that the premise for Pluribus doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm? But also, I have no idea what it’s about beyond the “everyone but the main character is all of a sudden super happy” concept, and I’ve actively avoided learning more. It was the same with Severance back in the day, and honestly the AppleTV/Vince Gilligan combo is very promising.)

Anyway, let’s settle in for some nonsense.

All Her Fault

A couple of years ago, my BFF coined the term “wine mom thriller”, meaning domestic thrillers that are specifically concerned with the lives of wealthy, mostly white women. There’s no hard and fast line dividing a wine mom thriller from your everyday domestic thriller, but it’s like pornography: I know it when I see it.

For example. Gone Girl is a wine mom thriller, but most of Sally Hepworth’s novels are regular domestic thrillers. Big Little Lies, the Liane Moriarty novel, is a satire of Sydney’s northern beaches communities; Big Little Lies, the HBO adaptation, is 100% pure wine mom thriller. In fact, much of Nicole Kidman’s recent work is in that genre.

Some tropes which I associate with the wine mom thriller:

• the protagonists are not just middle-class, but wealthy—terrible things are going to happen to this family, but don’t worry, they won’t be impoverished (I sound dismissive, but actually—as a person who experienced poverty growing up, and finds it extremely anxiety-provoking in fiction, I consider it a feature rather than a bug)

• at least one character is working in or somehow linked to the arts or media

• there’s a creeping subtext of fear of The Other infiltrating the security of the family unit

• but this is nearly always a red herring

• because the real threat is the family patriarch (this is common to the whole domestic thriller genre, which owes a lot to gothic fiction)

• but that is not to say, however, that the genre doesn’t have a problem with race; it is nearly always concerned with white families, while people of colour are infiltrators, domestic help or detectives

All Her Fault, the Peacock original limited series starring Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning, is 100% a wine mom thriller. The protagonist, Marissa (Snook) manages an investment fund; deuteragonist Jenny (Fanning) works in publishing, and we should not ask questions about how someone in the publishing industry and a high school teacher can afford a swish home and a nanny. Marissa’s five-year-old son is abducted via fake playdate (trust me), which plunges everyone into a nightmare of fear, media attention, social media rumours and recriminations.

Is All Her Fault actually good? No. The twists and turns are just on the wrong side of improbable, and there is so much more baby-stealing than I was prepared for in this, a show literally about stealing a baby.

Is it fun to watch? Absolutely.

Snook gives an outstanding performance, as she always does, but it also leaves me wondering why she’s doing Peacock originals while her Succession peers, Jeremy Strong and Keiran Culkin, do Oscar bait. Is it sexism? The fact that she had a baby shortly after Succession ended, and—at the time All Her Fault was filmed—had not yet shed the pregnancy weight? The relative lack of interesting roles for women in their late 30s, especially those who aren’t built to be action heroes? Wait, that’s just sexism.

It could simply be that Marissa is a very different character from Shiv Roy, and filming in Australia meant Snook could stay close to home and her new family.

Because, oh yeah, that’s the other reason I enjoyed this show. Melbourne stands in for Chicago, and does a fairly hilarious job of it. I glimpsed an Australian light switch in episode 1, and a tram in the background of episode 2, and familiar settings abound. “I bet their house is in Mornington,” I said of Marissa and her husband’s giant home, and sure enough!

Looking around Reddit, the contrast seems to be invisible to everyone but Chicagoans and Melburnians, so I guess it was done well, but Melbourne TikTok has been going off. I, for one, enjoyed the homeless encampment under the Bolte Bridge, just a few metres from Macaulay Station.

There is one other thing that All Her Fault does particularly well: it’s great with disability. Disabled actors play disabled characters (including one with an intellectual disability, though I don’t know if that is the actor’s specific condition), and there is a recurring theme of disabled people being entitled to self-determination and dignity without being forced to pass for able-bodied people.

There’s a bit early on where we’re told that Marissa’s brother-in-law never uses his wheelchair because he hates it, but the truth is actually more nuanced and, frankly, dark. (I will say, trigger warnings for gaslighting and emotional abuse of disabled people. And able-bodied people. The villain in this is mainly horrifying for how common and mediocre they are.)

The other thing it gets is the uneven division of labour in a lot of marriages. I’ve seen reviewers and Redditors complain about misandry, but I’m sorry to say it’s also a thing I’ve seen in real relationships—men who consider themselves babysitters to their own children, men who expect their wives to take care of their life-threatening allergies, men who don’t know the names of their kids’ best friends. I think this realism is key to the appeal of the whole domestic thriller genre, and All Her Fault observes it very well.

Generally the words “Peacock original” do not fill me with anticipation, but All Her Fault was a fun way to spend four nights, and where it’s good, it’s really good. And Port Phillip Bay gives a performance as Lake Michigan which is simply unmissable.