Co-stars wrestle with women's guilt

Meanwhile Jenny, a book marketer, hired Carrie Finch (Sophia Lillis), the nanny who turns out to be responsible for the kidnapping.

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"WHAT WOULD it be like to have the situation happen to me?" says Snook of her process in the series, which includes Duke McCloud as her young son, Milo.

(SARAH ENTICKNAP Peacock)

That’s one of the reasons creator Megan Gallagher was keen to adapt Andrea Mara’s novel for television.

“Within that material was this maternal guilt and this discrepancy in domestic labor tasks in heterosexual couples that, to me, is just this huge issue,” she says. “Every woman I know, who is roughly my age, is dealing with this. Every woman I know drops off their kid at school and sobs in the parking lot before they make it to work.”

After years of playing the icy Shiv Roy on “Succession,” whose pregnancy in the final season ultimately seems like another business maneuver for her, Snook was drawn to Marissa, who does care about being a good parent.

“I wanted to find a character that was just inherently warm,” Snook explains. “Shiv is in a similar kind of world, but she’s inherently cold. She wants to be warm but she can't. Whereas Marissa is just a nice, warm, friendly person who has a maternal quality naturally about her and sees someone upset and goes, ‘I got you.’”

That's how she initially meets Jenny. They bond, feeling mutually ill at ease in the bathroom at a school function while, coincidentally, wearing the same dress. After Milo goes missing, Marissa could easily turn on Jenny, but instead they develop a deeper connection.

“It was really nice to portray the really positive aspects of female friendship,” Fanning says on a separate call. “I think sometimes there can be tropes of the women pitted against each other.”