Who’s who in The Good Daughter? Cast and characters of the upcoming thriller

Welcome back to Pikeville, Georgia — whether Sam and Charlie Quinn like it or not. The sisters at the heart of The Good Daughter are both lawyers now, pulled in opposite directions by a past they’ve tried to outrun since a brutal home invasion destroyed their family. When a deadly school shooting rocks their hometown, it drags every buried secret into the open and forces them to work the same case from painfully different angles.

The six-part adaptation comes straight from the source: novelist Karin Slaughter serves as showrunner and wrote all six episodes. Director Steph Green (Watchmen, The L Word: Generation Q) helmed the entire run, giving the series a single, sustained point of view as it toggles between the sisters’ present-day investigation and the night that changed everything.

Slaughter addressed the show’s most delicate question — how to depict violence without turning trauma into spectacle — at an October 29 screening in New York. She told People she was “very mindful” about what to show and said those conversations happened before cameras rolled, with the priority on protecting cast and crew while keeping the story honest.

Cast and characters

• Rose Byrne — Samantha “Sam” Quinn: A New York patent attorney who fled Pikeville after surviving the attack that killed her mother. Coming home means taking on the case she least wants.
• Meghann Fahy — Charlotte “Charlie” Quinn: Sam’s younger sister, a defense lawyer who still works alongside their father. She becomes a crucial witness to the school shooting.
• Brendan Gleeson — Rusty Quinn: The town’s polarizing defense attorney and Quinn family patriarch, famous locally for representing clients who make juries bristle.
• Olivia Williams — Harriet “Gamma” Quinn: The sisters’ brilliant physicist mother, whose curious, exacting worldview reverberates long after she’s gone.
• Michael Dorman — Ben Bernard: Charlie’s estranged husband, a steady presence with deep ties to the Quinns.
• Harper Steele — Lenore: Rusty’s longtime office manager, a second parent of sorts who knows where the family bodies — metaphorical and otherwise — are buried.
• Jake McDorman — Mason “Huck” Huckabee: A local schoolteacher carrying a long-standing grievance against Rusty’s line of work.

From page to screen

The series adapts Slaughter’s 2017 bestseller and follows her previous page-to-screen run: Netflix ’s 2022 Pieces of Her, starring Toni Collette and Bella Heathcote, also centered on a daughter forced to reexamine family history after violence shatters the present. Here, Slaughter’s direct involvement — paired with Green directing every episode — suggests a faithful transfer of the novel’s shifting timelines and raw sibling dynamic.

Peacock will release the full season at once, so the mystery is built to binge. All episodes premiere November 12, 2026 .