The best dry shampoo for fine hair is blah-bi-di-bloo, and you should use it when you are in your post-ovulation luteal phase, la la la, tampons tampons tampons — OK, have we lost everyone who either will not care about or will be irritated by this column?

Good. Let’s talk about the ending of All Her Fault. There will be spoilers.

All Her Fault premiered on Peacock last week and features a Chicagoan named Marissa who has two problems. The first problem is that her son has just disappeared, which is the paint-by-numbers horror ostensibly driving the plot. The second problem, which is actually the one I keep hearing women talk about, is that she is the only one who can accurately describe him to the police.

“He’s … blond?” her very nice husband, Peter (Jake Lacy), offers, sweeping his hand across his forehead to mimic their five-year-old’s haircut. But everything else is up to Marissa: “Orange shirt, blue pants and his coat, which is mostly green and has a little dinosaur here,” she tells them.

Milo had a tracker in his backpack because she put it there; he was usually picked up from school by a nanny that she hired, but today the nanny was off, so Milo instead went to a play date that she had set up, via text with another mom. And then Marissa (Sarah Snook) arrived to pick him up from said play date, and the stranger who answered the door had no idea what she was talking about.

“Why didn’t you check the number?” Peter asks, distraught, when it becomes clear that the person who texted Marissa was not, in fact, a fellow parent. Marissa reacts as if she has been gut-punched, and you can see she’s asking herself multiple questions: why didn’t she double-check the number against the school directory to make sure she was really texting Jenny Kaminski? Is she a terrible mother? And also — Jesus, does she have to do absolutely everything?

All Her Fault is the Big Little Lies that the playground set has been waiting for. I had originally intended to write about it alongside the new remake of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, a dual meditation on the Hollywood trope that anyone who hires a babysitter is basically custom-ordering a kidnapping. But All Her Fault is much slyer and wryer. Yes, it’s a twisty flash-forward/backward/sideways show about a crime — and here I feel compelled to reassure you that we learn early on that Milo is fine. But it’s really a show about invisible labour, and about the way a primary parent can be sitting in the most important meeting of their professional career and still get a series of texts from their partner at home asking, “Where is Jacob’s water bottle?”

The prime suspect for the kidnapping is Jenny Kaminski’s nanny, who disappeared the same day Milo did. And so while Marissa searches frantically for her son, Jenny (Dakota Fanning) needs to piece together childcare for her kid while juggling the judgment of a community who wonders how on earth she could have hired such a monstrous caretaker to begin with. When Jenny and her husband sit down for their own interview with the police, Richie is frustrated that Jenny can’t identify anything retroactively suspicious about their missing employee. But when the detective pointedly asks Richie whether he had noticed anything odd in the nanny’s employment interview, Richie admits that he had not participated in the nanny’s hiring at all. Jenny is, you know, just better at that kind of thing.

Speaking of the detective: Alcaras (Michael Peña) exists primarily to rebut Richie’s learnt haplessness. He has a non-verbal 13-year-old, and, despite also working full time, he is seen capably and lovingly performing school drop-offs, running bedtime and remembering what colour of Skittles his kid dislikes. It’s very “not all men”, but also this guy is great. Because it’s not all men, it’s just the particular men of these dual-income homes in this particular fictional Chicago suburb, which is probably a stand-in for any suburb, anywhere, which is why on the Metro this morning I overheard a woman reminding her husband that Olive — who I am 99 per cent sure is their child and not a dog — won’t eat almond butter.

My previous role at the Post was writing about gender, and as a result, my inbox and my social-media feed became overrun with studies, links and primal cries about “the mental load”. And let me tell you, the entire script of All Her Fault could have been constructed by asking ChatGPT to synthesise the content of a dozen mommy message boards.

Do we have the mom complaining that she uses her alone time to go grocery shopping and clean the bathroom while her partner uses his to watch funny videos on his phone? Check. Do we have the token stay-at-home mom agreeing to emergency babysit everyone else’s kid, but then trying to use this fact to guilt-trip the other moms into volunteering for the school fundraiser? Check, and, justice for the SAHMs! There was a point halfway through All Her Fault where I wondered whether Marissa herself had arranged the kidnapping just so she could have a night off.

As a thriller, All Her Fault is middling. But as social commentary, it is a perfect distillation of where a hundred self-help books — Fair Play, How to Keep House While Drowning, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids — have ascertained we are as a society: women trying to model themselves after Michelle Obama while being held to the domestic standards of JD Vance. Women trying to work like it’s the 2020s while mothering like it’s the 1950s, only now no one is allowed to just shoo their kids outside until dinnertime because, unfortunately, a nanny is probably waiting to kidnap them.

Jenny Kaminski’s solution is to learn American sign language so that every time her husband paternalistically tells her she is “amazing”, she can covertly call him a 12-letter dirty word to his face. Marissa Irvine’s solution is to stop doing the invisible labour: her husband has a soy allergy. Marissa has been always the one to refill his prescription, keep the EpiPen at the ready, make sure all the food in the house is Peter-friendly.

And then one day, she doesn’t. Because it turns out that Peter isn’t a very nice guy. He’s a very bad guy. The kidnapping is actually all his fault — the result of a bad thing he did five years ago, the night the couple brought their son home from the hospital.

Turns out there was a lot of soy in that fancy buffet in the season finale. Turns out the EpiPen was empty. Turns out Peter didn’t know enough about the running of his household to realise any of this. Oops.

• Monica Hesse is a screens critic for The Washington Post’s Style section. Previously, she was an Opinion columnist who frequently wrote about gender and its impact on society. In 2022, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the field of commentary. She's the author of several novels, most recently They Went Left