At first glance, The Good Daughter (Thursday 12 November, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) should make you a little worried about Rose Byrne. Here is an actor not only at the top of her game, but quite frankly at the top of anybody’s. Her Apple TV show Platonic all but depends on her combination of emotional nuance and flawless slapstick to exist, and earlier this year she won a Golden Globe (and was nominated for an Oscar) for her wired, frayed lead performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
In other words, Byrne should be able to make anything she wants. So it’s bizarre that, of all things, she has chosen this. The Good Daughter is a paperback thriller show.
It’s one of those slightly preposterous programmes about trauma where everyone somehow manages to look astonishingly beautiful all the time. It’s David E Kelley territory. It’s Harlan Coben territory.
It’s Nicole Kidman in a silly wig territory. Still, at least it delivers on the trauma front. Written by Karin Slaughter, adapting her own novel, it is one of the most hilariously frontloaded things I have ever seen.
In the very first scene, two young girls witness their mother being shot in the face by masked intruders. In the second, we learn that this was a flashback remembered by Meghann Fahy (playing Byrne’s sister). In the third, Fahy accidentally walks in on a school shooting and ends up being beaten up by the police.
So dense with unpleasantries is the opening that you start to worry that The Good Daughter will end up being a sort of trauma-based Mr Bean where Fahy just blunders from catastrophe to catastrophe; maybe she’ll stand in a bear trap, then fall down some stairs while noticing a stain that reminds her of the time she watched her grandmother die. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite turn out to be the case, but it isn’t far off. However, once this early energy burns off, it does settle into a very good version of what it is.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
