HOW MUCH DRAMA can one small town take? In Pikeville, Georgia, the town at the centre of the new Sky series The Good Daughter, the answer is: a lot of drama indeed.

Pikeville is where the sisters Charlotte (Charlie) and Samantha (Sam) Quinn grew up with their mother Gamma and father Rusty. It’s where Rusty operates as a defence lawyer, and where the sisters endured a hugely traumatic incident as youngsters that left them literally and figuratively scarred.

It’s where the family find themselves, decades later, trying to take stock of what that trauma means for them all.

But is this new show, based on the Karin Slaughter novel of the same name, worth watching?

Family trauma

Brendan Gleeson as Rusty Quinn Peacock Peacock

The series opens in flashback, as we witness a horrendous incident in the Quinn home that leaves Sam badly injured and the family changed forever. If you’re not a fan of violent scenes involving children (and really, who in their right mind is?) take note.

Nearly three decades into the future – in the present day – Charlie (Meghann Fahy) is still living in the town, and is a defence lawyer like her father.

When she heads to a local high school to return a mobile phone to a one-night stand, she unwittingly gets embroiled in another shocking incident that ends with a young student accused of murder.

Days later, Rusty (Brendan Gleeson) is injured in an incident. Sam (Rose Byrne) returns home in the midst of the ongoing drama to check on her father.

Rusty is gregarious and warm, despite his intense job. But he and the sisters are traumatised. He hides it behind expressions of love and humour. Charlie is sharp-edged, acerbic and witty, often making decisions that are not just bad for her but everyone around her.

Sam has a limp and impaired vision, and is more reticent to engage with people than her sister. When Sam does speak, her built-up anger simmers under the surface. 

Charlie has the hardscrabble appearance and attitude of someone who stayed living in her small town, while Sam is more polished and rich. But though Sam has moved on somewhat from her family, she can’t help getting involved in the investigation into the killing and ends up representing a teenager with a learning disability who is charged with the crime her sister Charlie witnessed.

Small town

The Quinn sisters Peacock Peacock

Pikeville is the kind of town where no one forgets the past. We learn pretty quickly that the incident that exploded the Quinn sisters’ lives also impacted other people in the area, and there’s not a lot of sympathy there for the Quinns to soak up.  

That’s partly because of Rusty’s job: he is paid to defend those who may have committed serious crimes in the neighbourhood. Gleeson plays Rusty as a bit of a clown (he literally has a habit of putting a clown nose on to entertain his daughters, which alongside Gamma’s habit of quoting Emily Dickinson, feels a little bit sentimental on the screen). As his accent isn’t exactly flawless, let’s just imagine that Rusty Quinn is really an Irishman who decamped to Georgia in his 20s. He has the surname to match, after all. 

Fahy is excellent as the messy Charlie. She’s ostensibly separated from her husband Ben, but still thinks he’s her one true love. Her one-night stand, Huck, unfortunately gets mixed up in the school incident. Charlie gets some of the series’ best lines, and is appealing and believable as a woman who uses sarcasm and barbed one-liners to push back at a world that’s been unfair to her. But she’s not mean; she’s soft-hearted and caring. So is her sister, though she hides it more successfully.

Rose Byrne, always excellent in every project she commits to, is a more interior character here compared to what we’re used to, so the scenes when Sam and Charlie have it out are among the series’ best. They find it hard to be with each other, because they are reminded of what they lost all those years ago. Flashbacks to a period when they lived together in New York as adults show that Charlie was less than kind towards Sam, and both sisters bear some anger towards each other. But they love each other nonetheless.

American crime writer Karin Slaughter is one of the leaders in her field, selling more than 40 million copies of her books across the world. The Good Daughter demonstrates that Slaughter (who wrote the script) is often less interested in the gory details of a crime than the ripple effects of that crime and how everyone connected with it suffers in their own way.

The setting also offers a chance for the story to look at the lack of support for people living on the margins, or those with vulnerabilities. One interaction that Sam has with a police officer speaks to an America where rules come before people: the officer asserts that Sam’s cane, which she needs to help her walk, could be used as a weapon.

An early scene between Gamma and Charlie shows that their mother encouraged her daughters to leave the town and strike out on their own, but instead they are forever darkly connected to their hometown.

As the series progresses, we wait to see how the sisters might find common ground, and whether they’ll figure out what happened with the recent shooting. 

Guilt and shame

The Good Daughter’s pace at times is relatively languid, reflecting the slow heat of a Georgia summer. The series has many of the usual hallmarks of a small-town thriller: families harbouring secrets, young people suffering at the hands of their parents and classmates, and violence that pushes guilt and shame to the surface.

It offers complex relationships and interesting characters, with uncomfortable revelations that unfurl as the series gets deeper into the investigation.

While it doesn’t bring anything massively new to the small town thriller genre, it’s nonetheless an absorbing series that can be lauded for its interest in the lives of girls and women. While Sam, Charlie and other female characters are sometimes victims, they are also given agency in a setting that wants to strip them of their power.

The Good Daughter is streaming on NOW.