The Peacock limited series All Her Fault, starring Sarah Snook as wealth manager Marissa Irvine, was inspired by a real episode of parental terror experienced by author Andrea Mara, whose 2021 novel of the same name the show is adapted from. The eight-episode series has picked up seven nominations at the 2026 Emmy Awards, with the ceremony airing Sept. 14.
Snook told NPR's All Things Considered last year that the show "opens with a bang." Not a gunshot or an explosion, but the moment Marissa arrives at the house where she believes her 5-year-old son Milo is having a playdate, only to find he isn't there. "It's the wrong address," Snook said. "And the phone number that she was given to call the person whose playdate she was organizing with is, it's now unlisted."
What Happens in All Her Fault
Marissa shows up at the address texted to her by someone she believes is Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning), the mother of Milo's friend Jacob. Instead she is greeted by Esther (Linda Cropper), who is perfectly nice but is not Jenny at all. Esther calmly invites Marissa inside to help sort out what she hopes is a simple mix-up.
Marissa's embarrassment quickly turns to distress. When she finally reaches Jenny, a fellow working mother, it becomes clear neither of them knows where Milo is.
Marissa later admits to police that she never cross-checked the phone number against the school's class parent list before agreeing, without seeing the house, to the playdate. Her family's nanny was out of town, and she didn't want to cancel a work meeting. She had at least met Jenny once in person, at a school social.
The Real-Life Scare That Inspired the Story
In April 2015, Mara went to pick up her own then-5-year-old daughter and, as she later wrote in a 2021 piece for the Irish Independent, "was surprised when nobody answered the doorbell." Peering through a window, she saw no furniture and no signs anyone lived there.
"I checked the address on the printed class-list in my hand, I was in the right place," Mara wrote. "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 briefly feared it was "some kind of elaborate kidnap plan," imagining the family had inserted a fake daughter into her daughter's class for six months as part of a long-game plot.
A neighbor told her that nobody actually lived at the address. Despite knowing logically there was no kidnapping underway, Mara wrote that the "parent of small kids" part of her brain "went into sheer panic." Moments later, the neighbor explained the family had simply moved two streets over.
"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." She never told the mother she'd briefly feared an abduction. "That's not the kind of thing you say to someone you've met twice at a coffee morning."
Maternal Guilt at the Center of the Story
Series creator Megan Gallagher told the Los Angeles Times that Mara's real-life fright became the seed for a broader theme. "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," Gallagher said. "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."
Gallagher added that she also wanted to show women being "unapologetically passionate about their work, and that's OK for us to love our work."
Snook Draws on Her Own Experience
Snook, who is mother to a 3-year-old daughter with her husband, Dave Lawson, compared playing Marissa to the "emotional Olympics." Her own pregnancy was written into the plot of Succession, and she won a Tony Award in June for her title role in The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway.
"It was useful to kind of use my daughter," Snook told the LA Times of preparing for the role. "What would it be like to have the situation happen to me? I understand that more in depth now being a parent." Without giving away the plot, Snook said of the title: "it cannot be just her fault, that's just not possible."
Where to Watch
Of All Her Fault's seven Emmy nominations, two categories, Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Anthology or Movie and Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, were still to be announced heading into the Sept. 14 ceremony. The Emmy Awards air at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on NBC and stream on Peacock, with E!'s red carpet coverage starting at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT.
