Sarah Snook shakes off Shiv in twisty thriller ‘All Her Fault’

Most TV fans first encountered Sarah Snook as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, the stylish, guarded, sarcastic heiress she played on HBO’s “Succession.” As the only daughter of fictional billionaire Logan Roy, the character had spent a lifetime mastering the art of masking her real feelings and intentions; Snook played her as almost infuriatingly poised.

Peacock’s “All Her Fault,” which premieres this week, feels like karmic, or at least dramatic, redress. Snook, playing a mother frantically searching for her 5-year-old son, spends much of Megan Gallagher’s miniseries finding increasingly inventive (and compelling) ways to cry.

For fans of suspense, “All Her Fault” — based on the best-selling novel by Andrea Mara — has much to recommend it. Starring a murderer’s row of gifted actors, including Snook, Dakota Fanning, Jake Lacy, Abby Elliott, Jay Ellis, Sophia Lillis and Michael Peña, the series is an engaging thriller with an improbably high rate of satisfying twists.

Enjoyably sinister and melodramatic tropes abound: Besides an adorable missing child, there are suspicious nannies, insightful cops, toxic sibling relationships and troubled marriages. Also, a tense social milieu featuring “Big Little Lies”-style career women trying not to fall apart in their sumptuous homes.

Set in Chicago, the series begins with high-powered wealth manager Marissa Irvine (Snook) searching for an address, knocking on the door and telling the elderly woman who answers (Linda Cropper) that she’s there to pick up her 5-year-old son Milo (Duke McCloud), who she believes is there having a playdate with a classmate named Jacob (Tayden Jax Ryan). The woman pleasantly informs her there’s no Milo there. Together, they piece together what happened: The playdate Marissa had arranged for Milo had not been coordinated with Jacob’s mother, Jenny Kaminski (Fanning) at all, but with someone impersonating her. Marissa’s child is missing.

Nightmarish though the situation is, the opening, particularly when Marissa awkwardly explains she’s there for her son to an apparent stranger, invites the viewer to judge her at least a little. How could she know nothing about where Milo was playing? Or the person supervising him? Those niggles are the show’s way of ushering in its real thesis about the viewer’s (and the public’s) eagerness to judge maternal mistakes.

In much the way “Gone Girl” named the “cool girl” phenomenon, “All Her Fault” explores the ways that even apparently egalitarian marriages turn women into the default parents and household managers — and position them to take the blame when things go wrong.

In conversations with police, Marissa admits she had never been to Jenny’s home (where Milo was supposedly playing), never even spoke with her to confirm the playdate and didn’t bother to check whether the phone number she had been texting was Jenny’s. There are some mitigating circumstances: She needed child care because her nanny was on vacation, but the fact that both she and Jenny employ nannies only invites extra scorn from the tabloids and the public.

While Marissa and Jenny should be natural adversaries (for reasons I can’t get into here), a bond develops, partly because of how harshly they’re scrutinized and judged while the investigation unfolds.

Lacy — who may never escape how capably he played the rich, high-handed husband in “White Lotus” — plays Marissa’s spouse and Milo’s father, Peter, who also supports and appears to half-parent his much younger siblings Brian (Daniel Monks) and Lia (Elliott). Rounding out the Irvines’ circle is Marissa’s business partner Colin Dobbs (Ellis).

Those outside that core group include the nannies (Kartiah Vergara and Lillis) and the cops, particularly Detective Alcaras (Peña), an observant sleuth struggling to get his neurodivergent son (Orlando Ivanovic) the help and support he needs.

There are many strong performances here; Elliott, Peña and Lillis are particularly good. There are weaker ones, too, partly as a function of the writing; a few characters remain one-dimensional. But the pacing is terrific, and the miniseries understands its genre well, deftly deploying the viewer’s own fluency in narrative conventions against them. “All her Fault” is a tense, entertaining watch.

It is notably not a “prestige” production. This feels like solid network television, with all the frothy mastery (and some of the hokeyness) that implies. The music cues are loud and intrusive, instructing the viewer how to feel and what to dread at any particular moment. Red herrings abound. So many, in fact, that the show doesn’t hold up especially well under repeated viewings; it’s a touch too manipulative absent a “Gone Girl”-type framing device to justify the ruse.

Crucial elements are implausibly withheld, and at least one sinister scene goes entirely unexplained. That the writing is uneven doesn’t mean it’s bad, however; while certain plot points are flabby or undercooked, some scenes are exquisitely rendered and psychologically astute.

Snook, who recently won a Tony for her turn as all 26 characters in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” anchors the series with a ruined, exhausted intensity that frequently drifts close to collapse without seeming remotely fragile. It’s an intelligent, tough, grounded performance.

On a lighter note: The fact that both Snook and Matthew Macfadyen — who played Siobhan’s husband Tom on “Succession” — have limited series premiering the same day feels like a joke that show’s toxic patriarch, Logan Roy, might have arranged from beyond the grave. (Macfadyen stars as Charles Guiteau in Netflix’s “Death By Lightning,” a miniseries about President James Garfield and Guiteau, the man who shot him.) The media mogul would have relished the chance to pit Tom against Shiv, and as different as these new characters are, fans of the HBO drama may spot some surprising continuities.

•••

All Her Fault (8 episodes) premieres Thursday, Nov. 6, on Peacock.