The Good Daughter review – the best thing about this legal thriller? Brendan Gleeson’s sad toilet fart

“Why is ma laaahf filled with contrary feee-males?” grumbles dilapidated defence lawyer Rusty Quinn (Brendan Gleeson), his deep south vowels stretching like grilled cheese across his cluttered desk.Poor Rusty. As the father of two headstrong lawyer daughters, this sunken beanbag of fading masculinity is forced daily to endure the contrariness of feee-males who are forever challengin’ the status quo. “This is all bullshit,” snaps elder daughter Sam (Rose Byrne), by way of illustration. “You’re a dipshit,” adds Charlie (Meghann Fahy), thoughtfully. They sure don’t make his laaahf easy! But the sisters love ol’ Rusty, or at least do their best to tolerate his excruciating aphorisms (“Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day,” etc), and when a school shooting forces them to confront a long-buried family tragedy, the Quinns pull together. They need each other. Dammit, the whole town needs them. After all, shouts Charlie, “We’re the only lawyers that don’t roll over for the local cops!” Thus begins The Good Daughter, a steaming hillock of “smalltown secrets” bunkum that fulfils precisely the same purpose as a Harlan Coben adaptation. The whole town needs them … Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy. Photograph: Peacock/™ © 2025 Peacock TV LLC. All Rights Reserved.Adapted by Karin Slaughter from her standalone 2017 bestseller, the six-part, Georgia-set thriller begins with an astonishing pile-up of traumatic incidents. So much Big Stuff happens in the first 15 minutes that it feels as if the series has been turned upside down and shaken by the ankles until the contents of its pockets clattered on to the lino. Clank, jangle; plot everywhere. Thus we get: a horrifying family tragedy; a school shooting; police brutality; a vulnerable teenage suspect; Charlie cheating on her estranged husband with a man with a ponytail; a comically evil DA in an oversized white Stetson; a racoon called Henry. The rest of the first couple of episodes seem wispy in comparison, drifting woozily in and out of flashbacks that appear to have been filmed through a thin layer of Utterly Butterly. Said flashbacks find us in the 90s, when a pair of leering locals burst into the family home and blast beloved, poetry-quotin’ mom (Olivia Williams) to marmalade before turning their attentions to the teenaged Sam and Charlie.Said locals have evaded justice and now, three decades later, Rusty is a broken man. He looks like an omelette being shaken awake in a doorway. He carries a hip flask into which he has poured his fury and a burnin’ determination to fight for the underdog. At one point we see the widower flumped on a toilet while wearing a novelty clown nose. At another he turns to Charlie and, lower lip quiverin’ with decades of repressed pain, says, “I just farted.” He is, in a very real sense, Shatticus Finch. Indeed, so charismatic is this beacon of legal flatulence that when he is not on screen, the energy slumps and one finds one’s thoughts a-wanderin’. And, indeed, a-ponderin’. Specifically, you find yourself wondering what possessed Golden Globe winner Rose Byrne to appear in a series that requires her to deliver lines like, “Charlie, you know I only have 16% of the peripheral vision in my left eye!”Alas, for all their carefully applied quirks (Charlie talks to racoons! Sam stares into the middle-distance!) neither Charlie nor Sam is nearly as interesting as Rusty. And this is not, frankly, a brilliant look for a series that focuses on systemic sidelining of female trauma.You hope that a meaty conclusion will make up for it, that there’ll be a big, rousing moment when The Good Daughter finally removes the clown nose and addresses the consequences of what happens when women are forced to reframe their abuse to placate the men in their lives. But it’ll probably just be Rusty blowing off in court while Sam and Charlie roll their eyes. Darn those contrary feee-males! The Good Daughter is on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK and on Stan in Australia