The Good Daughter Creator Karin Slaughter on Bringing Her Book to Screen (EXCLUSIVE)
Go behind the scenes of making this sister centric story with a primarily female creative team.
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Spoilers ahead for The Good Daughter.
Peacock’s original limited series, The Good Daughter, is the streamer’s latest production that features a female creative team driving the perspective and execution of the story. It joins similar titles like Five-Star Weekend, All Her Fault, and Long Bright River, in making a space for female creators like writer/showrunner Karin Slaughter, director Steph Green (The Americans) and Made Up Pictures founder/producer Bruna Papandrea (Big Little Lies).
Adapted by Slaughter from her novel into this six-episode limited series, The Good Daughter stars Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy who play Samantha and Charlotte Quinn, sisters who experienced a tragedy in their youth that reframed their lives and are still working through the aftermath as estranged adults.
Green told Peacock Blog that The Good Daughter and its creative team represented a story that celebrated female perspectives both in front of and behind the camera. “A reason I wanted to work with Bruna at Made Up Stories is I knew she centered women filmmakers,” Green shared. "I knew she supported directors' visions, and it made complete sense that with a story told like this, where Karin was going to be here, that she would want a partner. And we created a partnership among us to hold the story a certain way."
Below, Slaughter, Green, Papandrea and Fahy discuss how The Good Daughter tells a tough, emotionally honest story with grace and empathy.
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Bruna Papandrea on carving a space for stories about and made by women
In 2012, producer Bruna Papandrea and Reese Witherspoon co-founded Pacific Standard to find, develop and produce stories to bring to film and television. Together, they made Gone Girl, Wild and in 2016, Big Little Lies which reignited adaptations of female-centric, books-to-series.
"TV had done a much better job than film of putting women at the center, including shows like Ally McBeal and Mary Tyler Moore. In film, we were not seeing that,” Papandrea assessed of the last decade in media. "The first TV show I made was Big Little Lies, so for me, reading that book was like nirvana. It's not just one woman, it's five."
Despite that series becoming a global hit with two seasons and inspiring other similar hits, Papandrea said it takes a lot to get the next one like it made. “What's frustrating, because let's tell the truth, it does feel like starting again every time because there's just not quite as much space,” she said of acquiring studio and funding greenlights for projects. "And that's where I give actually Peacock and NBCU so much credit. They stuck with us at every point in telling this story. It’s really hard to get a TV show made and for all the elements to come together. And this one was no exception. But I feel like the wind has been on our backs to some extent, but it’s like waves, right? It's never really easy.
“It’s why I have so much admiration for the people that say yes to these shows, who actually make that green light decision because they're big decisions,” she continued. "With this one, we had our partners from the [start], and they have we've been aligned with them from the out, which has been a part of the great experience."
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How Karin Slaughter adjusted The Good Daughter novel to a series
A first time television series screenwriter and showrunner, Karin Slaughter said she didn’t get in her own head about crossing storytelling formats.
“It's a very different medium, but at the core, they're both storytelling,” Slaughter told Peacock Blog. "One of the things that I do in the book is move [between] Charlie and Sam's perspectives, and I really wanted to maintain that in the scripts. You only see what happens through Charlie or Sam, if they're adults or they're children. You only stray outside of perspective once, and that's through another woman [Judith]."
Though The Good Daughter tackles heavy topics like murder and assault, Slaughter said it makes a huge difference from whose perspective those things are witnessed and revealed.
"I am very mindful as a woman who writes stories about women that a lot of stories are told about women suffering through the benefit of a man; that we’re part of his journey,” Slaughter observed. "In the book and in the script, I wanted these two women to be together on this journey, and their healing comes because they're strong. They were raised by a strong woman. They were, from a very early age, listened to and respected by their father. They expect that in the world because of this real, early relationship with their dad. But their story is their story, and their suffering is their own suffering, and they come to healing through their own strength."
Meghann Fahy’s favorite scene with Rose Byrne for Sam and Charlie
Actress Meghann Fahy told Peacock Blog that a scene that best conveyed their creative perspective comes midway through the limited series when Sam and Charlie leave their father’s funeral and have a deep discussion about long-simmering resentments, hurt and sadness they haven’t shared about their lives.
"It was a very, very intense day of getting all of that material and all of that dialogue and all of those emotions,” Fahy remembered. "But I think doing that with Rose in such a quiet space — and Steph Green, our director, who did every single episode, which is so insane and so hard, and she did such an incredible job — she really gave us the space, and the set was really well run and it was very respectful and responsible.
Rose and I felt that day that we really got to sit in those moments together, and I loved being able to do that with her,” she continued. "Those moments on a show like this are really hard because it's so fast moving and there's so much action and there's a lot of dialogue, so to really just sit down and have that out with Rose was definitely a day that sticks out for me."
