When a young adolescent plays contact or collision sports, there is a risk of serious injury or death. Boys playing middle school football or girls playing travel soccer are liable to get concussions that will result in life-long disabling conditions. In such cases, who is most responsible for the injury? The child may feel the need to “play through the pain” to support their team, so if they continue to play and then get hurt, it must be the player’s fault. Another kid may have caused the injury, so it must be the opponent’s fault. The coach may not have benched a player who had already taken a few hard hits or falls, so it’s the coaching staff’s fault. Parents or guardians signed their child up for the league, so it must be their fault. The league or organization didn’t have concussion or injury protocols, so it must be the organization’s fault. The equipment manufacturer did not create products safe enough for children to use, so it must be the company’s fault. Pro sports broadcasts often replay sequences that lead to injury or otherwise valorize “tough” playmaking, so it’s the broadcasters’ and big leagues’ faults.
There are many parties to consider blaming when things go wrong. In All Her Fault, Megan Gallagher’s mystery series about a missing five-year-old boy, the pronoun in the show’s title can apply to a number of the characters who might be most responsible for Milo Irvine’s kidnapping. See, he’s just a little guy at daycare. One day, he’s supposed to go home with his buddy Jacob Kaminski, and his nanny, Carrie Finch, so the boys can have a playdate the Kaminski household while all of the parents are working. These are busy, dual-income, high-striving suburban parents on Chicago’s North Shore, you see, so the families don’t know each other or each other’s nannies very well. Turns out that the playdate with Jacob never happened and the address that Marissa Irvine has in her phone from the Kaminski’s nanny is incorrect. She meets a flummoxed Esther Bauer at the house, who tries to talk her through the difficult situation of realizing a child his missing. No one can reach Carrie and neither of Jacob’s parents had ever set up the playdate in the first place. Oh, and the Irvine’s usual nanny, Ana Garcia, is off that week and will be leaving the country the next day…
So, whose fault is it? Ana, for taking a week off and conveniently planning to leave the country? Jacob’s mom, Jenny, for hiring a nanny without doing a robust enough background check? Marissa Irvine, for scheduling a playdate via text with someone she’s never contacted through that number and whose house she’s never visited? Carrie Finch for apparently kidnapping Milo and dropping off the face of the planet? The daycare, for not having stricter pick-up protocols for parents? There are many women who might be to blame here.
As the plot unfolds and the mystery deepens, we meet even more characters who could possibly be responsible for Milo’s abduction. One close associate of the family has a gambling addiction and may need the quick money that a ransom payment could provide. Another family member struggles with prescription pill abuse and could be chasing the money needed for another fix. Some of the parents are as awful and entitled as the most privileged people you could imagine, so maybe they resent Milo’s parents for the pettiest of reasons. (One of these reasons is that as a mom of an only child, certain moms such as Marissa and Jenny must have more time to give through volunteering for school fundraisers and events.) Maybe the parents are just faking it for attention, or even a book deal. After all, they are wildly successful people who know movers and shakers in the publishing industry who could get them a lucrative contract. Thankfully, not all of these people are women or femme-presenting, so the her in the show’s title does not seem as prescriptive and limiting as it might at first. Men and society blame women enough as it is.
The mystery of Milo’s disappearance and its eventual resolution involves parsing who knew or did what and when. There are many cases of lies of omission. Characters sometimes conceal what they know, even when questioned by a sympathetically cast lead detective who does not have the moral code he initially seems to possess. They aren’t deliberately telling an untruth, which is lying by commission. They are simply leaving out key details in their responses while not saying anything factually inaccurate. Part of it is a little sneaky, but as with most understandings in human interaction, the import of a small detail might not seem as significant the first time we consider it. It’s rewarding to see Detective Alcaras pursue these leads and details to learn information the audience might already know, or might be learning along with him. He provides helpful think-alouds with his detective buddy to keep us in the loop. As with any good mystery or gossip story, we enjoy trying to guess where these leads and clues will take us and deciding whom to trust.
A key element of the series is that these characters are busy with demanding jobs in publishing, wealth management, finance, teaching, and plenty of other jobs that seem to require in-person labor. They’re busy. The dads leverage that busyness or their business to beg out of responsibilities for childcare. A tale as old as time. If I were married to a man who would text and call me about the location of our child’s water bottle when I was trying to close a book deal with an important client, I would divorce him via Bitmoji in no time flat. Yes, this bumbling intrusion happens, and no, it’s not the deal-breaker that it should have been. If they’re not inept and passive aggressive, the high-achieving dads in this show must act as “protector” over their house, their wife, their siblings, their employees to maintain control of everything they touch. If you’re thinking this dynamic would result in gaslighting, you are absolutely correct. I can’t tell if it’s a weird streaming / buffering glitch or something with a green screen (if they even used it), but there were multiple episodes where it looked like the backgrounds were a mirage. One scene I chalked up to the steam rising from a teakettle between the characters, but the other scenes had no reason for this strange, wobbly background distortion to appear. It’s probably just digital artifacts from something in the way the show was filmed, but it still added to the atmosphere like the crackles and pops on a beloved album pressed to vinyl.
Given that the characters are so wealthy and powerful, it is worth considering how they use their money and power. A missing white child from an affluent area is a surefire way to get attention from the media. Leading up to the hiccup at a press conference where reporters accuse the Irvines of faking their son’s kidnapping, they take pains to present themselves as sympathetic. They know that their existing social media photos of drunken nights out or of lavish lifestyles will not endear them to the public. Their campaign to find Milo also involves a canvassing effort in the city. The level of organization needed for this undertaking seems huge, but all we see is a quick conversation between Marissa and her friend and colleague Colin Dobbs. He tells her he’ll take care of it and then hundreds of people show up. The labor that makes that whole effort happen is completely invisible to the viewer in the same way it is to the characters. In a later episode the missing rungs of the social ladder are apparent through two wildly different outcomes of drug distribution charges. A character who has little and is desperate for money to support a family gets arrested and imprisoned, while a well-to-do son of a private school dean can make a deal with someone who needs something from the school in order to get this fortunate son’s record expunged expediently. It’s not just that the rich avoid a consequence; their second chance comes at the expense of the career and integrity of a person in a lower social class. There’s a lot going on with this show!
If this review seems rushed, that’s because it is. Mrs. Tall Rob and I started watching last Wednesday. We got through one episode that night, another Friday, five more on Saturday, and finished it on Sunday afternoon. We usually pace ourselves with our television watching, but that all went out the window with All Her Fault. The premise is great and the many twists and turns and reveals (especially inter-family squabbling) make it a blast to watch. Even better, it contains a feminist critique of capitalism in that women receive blame for problems that are beyond their control (and are usually the fault of a mediocre white dude). Women are needed to be the care-giver and expected to be a provider while also managing their adult spouse’s social calendars, health needs, and emotional problems. The idea of “having it all” comes at a steep cost because even though one woman is not responsible for society’s shortcomings—or even her own—we’ll still think it is all her fault.
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