Megan Gallagher builds openings that grab anyone and finales that explain too much. In between she writes the tired, compromised professionals who make her crime adaptations worth watching, and then she lets the plot walk in on them.
Fi1m perspective
A woman drives to a stranger's house to collect her small son and the stranger has never heard of him. That is the first ten minutes of All Her Fault (2025), and it is the clearest statement of what Megan Gallagher does. She takes a crime novel, finds the moment in it that would frighten anyone, and puts it at the front. We watched Sarah Snook on that doorstep, frightened and level-voiced, and felt the floor go, and we have not had a small child in the house for years. Gallagher knows a hook like that buys a writer hours of goodwill. She then spends the goodwill on twists.
The career explains the habit. Gallagher is American and works out of Oslo, and she started in Nordic television, co-creating Borderliner (2017) and then creating Seizure (2019), an eight-part thriller about two detectives hunting a missing child. Wolf (2023), for the BBC, adapted Mo Hayder's Jack Caffery novels. Then came All Her Fault, from Andrea Mara's book, written with Phoebe Eclair-Powell and James Smythe, and The Blame (2026), from Charlotte Langley's, with Namsi Khan and Ashley Sanders. Nearly everything is an adaptation, nearly everything is a crime story, and the titles alone tell you who she thinks gets held responsible.
What works is the second programme, the one under the whodunnit. In The Blame it is what police officers say to each other when they think nobody is reading; Michelle Keegan is good in it and Ian Hart is better. In All Her Fault it is a mother whose fear the series takes seriously for four episodes before the machinery takes over. Gallagher writes professionals well: exhausted, compromised, still turning up. She is less good at trusting them to carry an hour without a body or a revelation.
Her own account of All Her Fault is that "the things I wanted to stick to most in the book were these incredible twists and turns that Andrea had laid out", and that is the problem stated by the person best placed to state it. The twists are the part of these books that least needed protecting. By the end of All Her Fault the series was explaining its coincidences to us with a straight face, and in The Blame the mystery keeps interrupting the better drama about the force. Both are worth your week, and The Blame in particular drew warmer reviews than we could give it.
We would still watch whatever she adapts next, because the openings alone are worth the first evening. Watch for the people, and expect the plot to interrupt them.
Biography
Megan Gallagher is an American-born writer and television creator based in Oslo. She created and wrote the BBC crime series Wolf (2023) and the Peacock limited series All Her Fault (2025), on which she also served as executive producer.
Her earlier credits include creating Seizure (2019) and co-creating Borderliner (2017), writing episodes of Suspicion (2022) and Harlan Coben's Lazarus (2025), and the screenplay for the film Grand Hotel (2016). She is the creator and writer of the upcoming ITV series The Blame (2026).
Gallagher has received a BAFTA Cymru nomination for Wolf and Primetime Emmy nominations for All Her Fault.
