Originally appeared on E! Online
Sarah Snook wasn’t kidding when she said All Her Fault—nominated in four categories at Critics Choice Awards 2026—”opens with a bang.”
Not due to a gunshot or an explosion, but you can practically hear her character Marissa Irvine’s stomach drop when she arrives at the house where she thinks her 5-year-old son Milo is having a playdate and he’s nowhere to be found.
“It’s the wrong address,” Snook told NPR’s All Things Considered. “And the phone number that she was given to call the person whose playdate she was organizing with is—it’s now unlisted.”
Such is the heart-stopping premise of the Peacock limited series All Her Fault, based on Andrea Mara‘s 2021 novel of the same name, in which successful wealth manager Marissa finds herself accused of a variety of sins, not least of them being that she works and therefore delegates some child care to a nanny.
While Snook, who’s mom IRL to a 2-year-old daughter with husband Dave Lawson, compared the acting experience to the “emotional Olympics” as Marissa is put through the ringer, the beginning of All Her Fault is inspired by a moment of terror Mara experienced with her own child.
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In April 2015, Mara went to pick up her then-5-year-old daughter and “was surprised when nobody answered the doorbell,” the author wrote in a 2021 piece for the Irish Independent, sharing how her book came to be. “I tried again. Still no answer. Awkward. Not odd yet, just awkward.”
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But once she peered through a window and saw no furniture or “any signs of habitation at all,” she started to worry, Mara recalled. “I checked the address on the printed class-list in my hand—I was in the right place. So where were the people who were minding my daughter? And actually, now that I thought about it, how well did I really know them?”
The Dublin-based writer thought, “Was this some kind of elaborate kidnap plan, whereby they’d inserted their (fake?) daughter into my daughter’s class for the last six months, in a long-game bid to kidnap her?”
In All Her Fault, Marissa shows up at the address texted to her by someone and is greeted by Esther (Linda Cropper), who’s perfectly nice but is not Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning)—the mom Marissa thought invited Milo for a playdate with Jenny’s son Jacob. Esther calmly invites Marissa inside to help her get to the bottom of what she can only hope is an autocorrect-fueled misunderstanding.
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Marissa’s initial embarrassment gives way to distress, and when she finally does reach Jenny, it hits home that she has no idea where her son is. Jenny, a fellow working mom, is sympathetic but equally baffled.
Marissa admits to police that she didn’t cross-check the number she thought was Jenny’s with the class parent list before agreeing—house unseen—to the playdate, sharing that her family’s nanny was out of town and she preferred to not have to cancel a meeting.
She had at least talked to Jenny in person at a school social—similar to how Mara had met the other mom in question twice on school coffee mornings.
As her mind started racing outside the empty house in 2015, Mara noted, a woman from next door informed the author that nobody lived at the residence where she thought her daughter was playing.
“Much as the logical part of my brain knew there couldn’t really be an elaborate kidnap plan in progress,” Mara wrote, “the ‘parent of small kids’ part of my brain went into sheer panic.”
She was put out of her misery seconds later when the woman told her the family had moved two streets over, and she’d be happy to give Mara their new address.
“Five minutes later, I had my daughter by the hand,” Mara wrote, “and was joking with the mother about turning up at the wrong house. I didn’t, of course, tell her I’d briefly worried she’d abducted my child. That’s not the kind of thing you say to someone you’ve met twice at a coffee morning.”
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All is not so easily resolved for Marissa over the course of All Her Fault‘s eight episodes. The married, schedule-challenged professional is so riddled with guilt during the search for her son that she starts questioning all of her life choices, let alone her seemingly benign decision to text back without first checking the school directory to rule out the possibility that her family was the target of a malicious plot.
But while Mara’s mind birthed the majority of the thriller, the seed of the story rang true.
“Within that material was this maternal guilt and this discrepancy in domestic labor tasks in heterosexual couples that, to me, is just this huge issue,” series creator Megan Gallagher told the Los Angeles Times. “Every woman I know, who is roughly my age, is dealing with this. Every woman I know drops off their kid at school and sobs in the parking lot before they make it to work.”
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At the same time, she explained, “I really like showing that women are unapologetically passionate about their work, and that’s OK for us to love our work.”
Snook’s pregnancy was written into the storyline on Succession and she won a Tony Award in June for her titular portrayal in The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway, so she knows all about being a thriving working mom.
To put herself in Marissa’s shoes, “It was useful to kind of use my daughter,” the Australian star told the LA Times. “What would it be like to have the situation happen to me? I understand that more in depth now being a parent.”
And what Snook could say about All Her Fault, without giving anything away, was that “it cannot be just her fault, that’s just not possible.”
But sometimes truth is just stranger than fiction, as is the case with these enduring unsolved mysteries:
Watch the Critics Choice Awards 2026 live Sunday, Jan. 4, at 7 p.m. on E! and USA Network.
JonBenét Ramsey
The 6-year-old pageant star was brutally murdered at her Colorado home on Christmas 1996. Her parents, brother and more have all been suspects, but to this day no one really knows who killed JonBenét.
Nicole Brown Simpson & Ron Goldman
O.J. Simpson, who died in April 2024 after a battle with cancer, was found guilty in a civil trial of both 1994 murders, but in the criminal trial, the jury acquitted him. Technically, in the eyes of the law, the famous NFL player didn’t do it, so their murderer remains unknown (and perhaps at large).
Tupac Shakur
Depending on whom you ask, someone might say Tupac is still alive. But the “Changes” rapper was murdered in 1996, and the investigation is still unsolved.
Notorious B.I.G.
About a year and a half after Tupac, Biggie Smalls was shot four times in a drive-by shooting. His killer still remains unknown.
Caylee Anthony
Casey Anthony, Caylee’s mother, went through a highly publicized trial only to be found not guilty of her daughter’s murder. As a result, it’s still unknown who murdered this little girl.
Elizabeth Short a.k.a. The Black Dahlia
Short, who was murdered in 1947, and the mystery surrounding her death became an instant media sensation. She received “The Black Dahlia” moniker posthumously, but to this day, her killer remains unknown.
Andrew Borden & Abby Borden
This couple was brutally murdered with an axe in 1892, but it was their daughter, Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted for the crime. The deaths of Andrew Borden and Abby Borden were never solved.
Jack the Ripper
In 1888, an unknown serial killer hit the streets of London. More than 100 years later, the identity of Jack the Ripper remains unknown.
The Chicago Tylenol Murders
These murders were a series of poisoning deaths resulting from drug tampering in Chicago in 1982. The victims, who included children, had all taken Tylenol-branded acetaminophen capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide. A total of seven people died in the original poisonings, with several more deaths in subsequent copycat crimes. The person responsible is still unknown.
The Zodiac Killer
He was a serial killer who acted in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but his identity still remains unknown. The killer originated the name “Zodiac” in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.
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