Review: In 'The Good Daughter,' trauma and drama are wrapped in a Southern-set murder mystery

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Set us as preferred You’d have to screw up your eyes to find anything substantially the matter with “The Good Daughter,” a solid limited series premiering Thursday on Peacock.Adapted by Karin Slaughter (author of the books on which “Will Trent” is based), from her own 2017 novel, it’s a murder mystery, a legal drama, a cold case story, a family drama, a small-town soap opera, and in some ways, what they used to call a women’s picture, though not a sentimental one.Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy play estranged sisters warily reunited in their hometown of Pikeville, Ga.

(Points for filming in Georgia.) Charlie (Fahy) is a simple country lawyer, working with her flamboyant, puckish father Rusty Quinn (Brendan Gleeson), who has a habit of popping a red clown nose onto his own and a bent for literary quotation and homilies along the lines of “Never kick a turd on a hot day.” They’re “the only defense lawyers in town who didn’t roll over for the cops,” which you might imagine would make them very popular, but you would be wrong.(Harper Steele, Will Ferrell’s real-life friend from “Will & Harper,” plays their more-than-a-secretary, Lenore.)Charlie’s older sister, Sam (Byrne), is a New York City patent attorney with the features of an Art Deco figurine; she charges $2,000 an hour, making the viewer question his life choices.

Sam is recalled to Pikeville at the end of the first episode by a chainsmoking Rusty, who has been stabbed, telling her in a voicemail, “Your sister needs you.”Something traumatic happened in the past to the family and something happens around them in the present, and you may well suppose that they are somehow related, and maybe they are and maybe they aren’t.In the past-set scenes — there is a lot of flashing back — two masked gunmen enter the Quinns’ house, leaving...