Dakota Fanning's 8-Part Psychological Thriller Is Gone Girl Meets Big Little Lies

Published Jul 19, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

Liz Hersey is an Editor and Critic for ScreenRant's TV team, editing, reviewing, writing, and creating content about the iconic shows you love to watch. She began her editing career at ScreenRant in 2019, shortly after joining the site as a Writer that same year.

With a passion for all things books, Liz frequently attends Toronto literary events and conferences, and loves interacting with her book lover community. In addition to being an avid reader of the romance and thriller genres, Liz is a writer of several short stories, and is currently at work on a young adult witch novel.

When she's not working, reading, or writing, Liz can be found seeing movies at her local cinema, attending live jazz events, or curling up on the couch to binge her favorite TV shows.

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On the small screen, Big Little Lies forever changed television when it premiered on HBO in 2017. Another adaptation of a best-selling novel, this one by Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies was an engrossing thriller centered on a group of wealthy mothers who are somehow connected to a murder.

Beloved by audiences, critics, and awards voting bodies, the series proved that female-driven narratives could be prestige TV as well. Though the show was originally conceived as a miniseries, its popularity not only prompted HBO to greenlight a second season but also Big Little Lies season 3, which is expected to start filming this fall.

Though the domestic thriller trend has waned in the 2020s, it hasn't vanished completely, and the success of Peacock's All Her Fault has proven that there's still a market for series about sordid suburbanites. Released in November 2025, All Her Fault, based on the novel by Andrea Mara, begins with the worst day of Marissa Irvine's (Sarah Snook) life. The wealthy mother goes to pick her son Milo (Duke McCloud) up from a playdate, only to find that the woman answering the door has never heard of him.

With Milo considered officially kidnapped, Marissa and her husband Peter (Jake Lacy) are desperate to find him, and all the while, their marriage and family are unraveling around them. In perhaps Dakota Fanning's best role to date, she plays Jenny Kaminski, a mom friend with domestic drama of her own whom Marissa leans on for support.

All Her Fault broke viewership records for Peacock when it first premiered, and it's still the streaming platform's most-watched original series to date. When the nominations for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards were announced earlier this month, All Her Fault scored seven, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and acting nods for Snook and Fanning. Given that it combines the best of Gone Girl and Big Little Lies, it's easy to see why All Her Fault is such an unprecedented success.

All Her Fault's Gone Girl-Inspired Twists Set It Apart From Big Little Lies Imitators

The overlap in the Venn diagram between All Her Fault and Big Little Lies is quite large: both are about well-off mothers connected to a horrific crime that exposes not only their secrets but also those of their nearest and dearest. However, to dismiss All Her Fault as just another Big Little Lies knockoff — of which there are many — would be a mistake.

However, whereas most of these other shows tend to focus on the central crime throughout their entire run, a major Gone Girl-esque twist midway through All Her Fault changes everything. Suddenly, All Her Fault is no longer a simple whodunit, but a dark psychological thriller, as the Irvines discover that the biggest threats aren't strangers, but one of their own.

What's so fascinating about Marissa as a character is that she's not a straight-up Amy Dunne clone — if anything, some of All Her Fault's many twists find her more in a position similar to Nick's (Ben Affleck) in Gone Girl. However, though Marissa is much more sympathetic than Amy, she still possesses some of Amy's cold ruthlessness, which deliciously comes into play in All Her Fault's shocking ending.

In this regard, All Her Fault is actually a cut above Big Little Lies, because Marissa proves to be much darker and more complex than any of the Monterey Five. With a tagline like "All these nice people... killing each other," Amy Dunne would certainly be proud.

Release Date 2025 - 2025-00-00

Network Sky Atlantic

Directors Kate Dennis, Minkie Spiro

Writers Phoebe Eclair-Powell, Megan Gallagher, James Smythe