Sarah Snook has provided plenty of proof about how good an actress she is, and attention has been paid. She won an Emmy Award for her role as Shiv Roy, one of the manipulative wealthy siblings on Succession, and won a Tony Award for playing 26 different roles in her one-woman Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In her new Peacock TV miniseries, All Her Fault, Snook plays only one role — but right from the opening scene, it’s a dramatic and challenging one, and she pulls you right in. Snook’s Marissa Irvine is a wealthy wife with a 5-year-old son. We meet her, at the start of All Her Fault, running a seemingly mundane errand — picking up her son from an after-school playdate at the home of Jenny, one of the other classroom moms.

Except when Marissa arrives at the address that Jenny had texted to her, the woman who lives there isn’t Jenny. Her name is Esther, and she knows nothing about a playdate, or about Marissa’s son, Milo.

From there, things escalate quickly and frighteningly. Milo has an electronic tracker in his backpack, but it’s been disabled. When Esther uses the correct phone number to call Jenny, who’s played by Dakota Fanning, the news gets even worse. In the space of a few moments, Marissa goes from calm to justifiably panicked.

This is all before the opening credits. Megan Gallagher, who created and wrote the TV adaptation of Andrea Mara’s novel, ramps the tension to a fever pitch at the very beginning, then follows the narrative in two directions at once.

Part of All Her Fault moves forward, day by day, tracking the events as the police work with the family to try to locate Milo. But an equal part of the story is told in flashback — revealing, slowly and sometimes surprisingly, the mysterious pasts of many of the characters.

There are lots of characters, and they’re almost like a school of red herrings — at some point, it’s fair to suspect all of them of something nefarious. The detective on the case, played by Michael Peña, has his hands full, but Peña is up to it. Whether he’s interacting with suspects in an interrogation room or playing with his own young son at home, Peña radiates sensitivity and weariness, like Mark Ruffalo in Task.

The rest of the exceptional performances are turned in by women. Fanning’s Jenny becomes a key character. So does Abby Elliott, from The Bear, who plays Marissa’s sister-in-law. Her emotional range, and rawness, matches that of Snook — and the same can be said of Sophia Lillis, who plays a nanny who becomes increasingly central to the plot.

The drama’s focus on all these women is not coincidental. Told from their characters’ perspectives, their differing viewpoints and memories are crucial. So are the performances of the actresses who play them.

The title All Her Fault turns out to be relative, depending upon which “her” in the story is being blamed. Eventually, all of them are. But the women in front of, and behind, the camera in All Her Fault deserve nothing but credit. It’s a thriller, and a psychological drama, that works so well mostly because of them.  

When Xavier “X” Atencio was plucked by Walt Disney in 1965 to be one of his early theme park designers, he was slotted on a number of projects that placed him out of his comfort zone.

Atencio, for instance, never would have envisioned himself a songwriter.

One of Atencio’s first major projects with Walt Disney Imagineering — WED Enterprises (for Walter Elias Disney), as it was known at the time — was Pirates of the Caribbean. In the mid-’60s when Atencio joined the Pirates team, the attraction was well underway, with the likes of fellow animators-turned-theme park designers Marc Davis and Claude Coats crafting many of its exaggerated characters and enveloping environments. Atencio’s job? Make it all make sense by giving it a cohesive story. While Atencio had once dreamed of being a journalist, his work as an animator had led him astray of a writer’s path.

Atencio would not only figure it out but end up as the draftsman of one of Disneyland’s most recognizable songs, “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me).” In the process, he was key in creating the template for the modern theme park dark ride, a term often applied to slow-moving indoor attractions. Such career twists and turns are detailed in a new book about Atencio, who died in 2017. “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of an Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” (Disney Editions), written by three of his family members, follows Atencio’s unexpected trajectory, starting from his roots in animation (his resume includes “Fantasia,” the Oscar-winning short “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” and even stop-motion work in “Mary Poppins”).

For Pirates of the Caribbean, Atencio is said to have received little direction from Disney, only that the park’s patriarch was unhappy with previous stabs at a narration and dialogue, finding them leaning a bit stodgy. So he knew, essentially, what not to do. Atencio, according to the book, immersed himself in films like Disney’s own “Treasure Island” and pop-cultural interpretations of pirates, striving for something that felt borderline caricature rather than ripped from the history books.

Indeed, Atencio’s words — some of those quoted in the book, such as “Avast there! Ye come seeking adventure and salty old pirates, aye?” — have become shorthand for how to speak like a pirate. The first scene written for the attraction was the mid-point auction sequence, a section of the ride that was changed in 2017 due to its outdated cultural implications. In the original, a proud redheaded woman is the lead prisoner in a bridal auction, but today the “wench” has graduated to pirate status of her own and is helping to auction off stolen goods.

At first, Atencio thought he had over-written the scene, noticing that dialogue overlapped with one another. In a now-famous theme park moment, and one retold in the book, Atencio apologized to Disney, who shrugged off Atencio’s insecurity.

“Hey, X, when you go to a cocktail party, you pick up a little conversation here, another conversation there,” Disney told the animator. “Each time people will go through, they’ll find something new.”

This was the green light that Atencio, Davis and Coats needed to continue developing their attraction as one that would be a tableau of scenes rather than a strict plot.

Tying it all together, Atencio thought, should be a song. Not a songwriter himself, of course, Atencio sketched out a few lyrics and a simple melody. As the authors write, he turned to the thesaurus and made lists of traditional “pirating” words. He presented it to Disney and, to Atencio’s surprise, the company founder promptly gave him the sign off.

“Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me),” Atencio would relay, was a challenge as the ride doesn’t have a typical beginning and ending, meaning the tune needed to work with whatever pirate vignette we were sailing by. Ultimately, the song, with music by George Bruns, underlines the ride’s humorous feel, allowing the looting, the pillaging and the chasing of women, another scene that has been altered over the years, to be delivered with a playful bent.

The auction scene of Pirates of the Caribbean in its current incarnation as seen at Walt Disney World Resort’s Magic Kingdom.

(Charles Sykes / Invision / Associated Press)

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The song “altered the trajectory” of Atencio’s career. While Atencio was not considered a musical person — “No, not at all,” says his daughter Tori Atencio McCullough, one of the book’s co-authors — the biography reveals how music became a signature aspect of his work. The short “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom,” for instance, is a humorous tale about the discovery of music. And elsewhere in Atencio’s career he worked on the band-focused opening animations for “Mickey Mouse Club.”

“That one has a pretty cool kind of modern instrument medley in the middle,” Kelsey McCullough, Atencio’s granddaughter and another one of the book’s authors, says of “Mickey Mouse Club.” “It was interesting, because when we lined everything up, it was like, ‘Of course he felt like the ride needed a song.’ Everything he had been doing up to that point had a song in it. Once we looked it at from that perspective, it was sort of unsurprising to us. He was doing a lot around music.”

Xavier “X” Atencio contributed concepts to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, including its famous one-eyed cat.

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

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Atencio would go on to write lyrics for the Country Bear Jamboree and the Haunted Mansion. While the Haunted Mansion vacillates between spooky and lighthearted imagery, it’s Atencio’s “Grim Grinning Ghosts” that telegraphs the ride’s tone and makes it clear it’s a celebratory attraction, one in which many of those in the afterlife prefer to live it up rather than haunt.

Despite his newfound music career, Atencio never gave up drawing and contributing concepts to Disney theme park attractions. Two of my favorites are captured in the book — his abstract flights through molecular lights for the defunct Adventure Thru Inner Space and his one-eyed black cat for the Haunted Mansion. The latter has become a fabled Mansion character over the years. Atencio’s fiendish feline would have followed guests throughout the ride, a creature said to despise living humans and with predatory, possessive instincts.

In Atencio’s concept art, the cat featured elongated, vampire-like fangs and a piercing red eye. In a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” it had just one eyeball, which sat in its socket with all the subtlety of a fire alarm. Discarded eventually — a raven essentially fills a similar role — the cat today has been resurrected for the Mansion, most notably in a revised attic scene where the kitty is spotted near a mournful bride.

Xavier “X” Atencio retired from Disney in 1984 after four-plus decades with the company. He drew his own retirement announcement.

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

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Co-author Bobbie Lucas, a relative of Atencio’s colloquially referred to by the family as his “grandchild-in-law,” was asked what ties all of Atencio’s work together.

“No matter the different style or no matter the era, there’s such a sense of life and humanity,” Lucas says. “There’s a sense of play.”

Play is a fitting way to describe Atencio’s contributions to two of Disneyland’s most beloved attractions, where pirates and ghosts are captured at their most frivolous and jovial.

“I like that,” Lucas adds. “I like someone who will put their heart on their sleeve and show you that in their art.”

Teen Vogue staffers have taken to social media to share the news they’ve been laid off, just as Condé Nast announced the outlet will be “joining Vogue.com, a transition that’s part of a broader push to expand the Vogue ecosystem.”

Teen Vogue covered fashion and celebrity, but also took in-depth looks at politics and social justice issues. Their writers have tackled everything from climate change to political pressures on universities, celebrity style to Billie Eilish’s recent comments about billionaires.

According to a statement posted on X from Condé United, a bargaining unit of the union the NewsGuild of New York, six of its members who worked for Teen Vogue are being laid off.

The union statement said that most of the six “are BIPOC women or trans, including Teen Vogue‘s politics editor, . . . Teen Vogue now has no writers or editors explicitly covering politics.” The statement also says that after the layoffs, there is only one woman of color on the editorial staff.

A statement posted on Vogue.com said that Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Versha Sharma “will be leaving the company.” Chloe Malle, head of editorial content for American Vogue, will oversee the outlet.

“I was laid off from Teen Vogue yesterday, along with 70% of my incredible team,” Kaitlyn McNab Teen Vogue‘s culture editor, posted on X. “Much longer post incoming, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has reached out to me with love. God got me. We move.”

The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank which recently awarded Teen Vogue its 2025 Freedom of Speech and Expression awards, criticized the move. “The decision by Condé Nast today to collapse this publication into Vogue and eliminate the politics reporting staff at Teen Vogue is evidence that corporate concentration eliminates innovative ideas and silences voices with less power,” it said in a statement.

Vogue said the move is not intended to diminish Teen Vogue. It said, “The title will remain a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission; sitting under the Vogue umbrella will provide a more unified reader experience across titles.”

Vogue Business, for industry professionals, was folded into Vogue.com’s platform last week.

This story was edited by Jennifer Vanasco.