Where was The Good Daughter filmed? The Georgia town in the show doesn't exist, but its city hall does
Pikeville, Georgia, isn't on any map, yet the courthouse in The Good Daughter has a street address and a customer service lobby.
The Good Daughter is Peacock's six-episode limited series based on Karin Slaughter's 2017 novel, released all at once on November 12, 2026. Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy play Sam and Charlie Quinn, sisters whose mother was killed in an attack on their family home, and Brendan Gleeson plays their father Rusty, a defense lawyer. Decades later, a shooting at the local middle school drags the sisters back to Pikeville, and much of what follows plays out in the town's courthouse. Slaughter wrote every episode and ran the show herself.
Is Pikeville a real town?
No. Pikeville is a fictional Appalachian town, loosely based on Blue Ridge, Georgia, according to NBCUniversal's production notes. Slaughter has a home near Blue Ridge, and early in production she took production designer Michael Bricker and his team around the town and the North Georgia mountains. The homes and landscapes they saw there shaped what Pikeville looks like on screen.
Pikeville is fictional; the woods around it are not.
Director Steph Green treated shooting in Georgia as essential, and the team leaned on the state's dense woods for the flashbacks: the further the story goes into the past, the more overgrown the setting gets.
Why it wasn't shot in Toronto
Georgia was not the default. The production flew Slaughter to Toronto to scout locations, and she came back unconvinced. "Toronto is a lovely city, but they don't have kudzu everywhere," she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She had a longer list:
"They don't have the proliferation of churches."
Slaughter won. The series shot from March to June 2025 under the code name GAMMA, the nickname of the murdered mother, with stages at Assembly Studios in metro Atlanta. "On any given day, we had two to 300 Georgians who were employed," Slaughter told the AJC.
The city hall that plays the courthouse
The building in the headline is One Griffin Center, Griffin's city hall and municipal court, at 100 South Hill Street, about 40 miles south of Atlanta. The production was issued a permit to film there on March 21, 2025, and the city closed its Customer Service Lobby and Municipal Court at 4 p.m. on March 19 to make room. Griffin's real courtroom became the interior of the Pikeville courthouse.
The city's Camera Ready liaison, Karen Bennett, was proud of the pick. "Of all the municipalities in the state, they chose Griffin to film," she told the Griffin Daily News, adding:
"It will be interesting to see how our Municipal Courtroom will be featured."
The crew came back to Griffin twice that June.
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The outside is a church
Pikeville's courthouse is two buildings stitched together. The interiors are Griffin's city hall; the exterior is the Family Life Center of First Baptist Church of Marietta, 148 Church Street NE, dressed as the Pikeville County Municipal Building and filmed on June 24, 2025. The proliferation of churches came in handy after all.
The Good Daughter filming locations
- Griffin: One Griffin Center, the city hall and municipal court, for the Pikeville courthouse interiors.
- Marietta: First Baptist Church's Family Life Center, for the courthouse exterior.
- Metro Atlanta: Assembly Studios, for stage work, plus locations around the city.
- Blue Ridge: the real mountain town Pikeville is modeled on, which the AJC also lists among the show's locations.
Filming wrapped in June 2025. Griffin got its answer on November 12, 2026: its municipal courtroom is where much of Pikeville's legal drama plays out.
Previously we wrote: Why did Sam kill the priest in Black Doves? The show saves that answer for his last walk with Reed