How Jeff Beal Scored Every Parent's Worst Nightmare in All Her Fault

When Sarah Snook’s character discovers her son isn’t where he’s supposed to be in the first moments of All Her Fault, she experiences a particular kind of terror. For composer Jeff Beal, that emotional state became the starting point for everything. “Beyond sad,” Beal says. “It’s shock. It’s almost like a type of nausea.” Joining Crafty for an episode of Come Fly With Me at The Aviator on Melrose, the six-time Emmy-winning composer described how he searched for a musical language capable of expressing a mother’s worst nightmare. The answer came through experimentation. While improvising at the piano, Beal discovered a rumbling bass line that felt physically unsettling, almost as if the ground beneath the character had disappeared. Above it emerged a simple four-note pattern that eventually became the musical identity of the missing Milo. That willingness to discover rather than dictate comes from Beal’s background in jazz. Even when working on a tightly structured television series, he approaches music as a process of exploration. For All Her Fault, however, the challenge was especially daunting. Beal joined the production late, after all eight episodes had already been shot and edited. Instead of developing the score alongside production, he was handed the completed season and asked to find its musical voice. Despite having access to the entire story, he chose to compose chronologically. “I love to write chronologically,” he explains. “It’s really important that the score tracks the emotional journey of the audience.” That journey proves more complicated than viewers initially expect. What begins as a mystery about a missing child gradually transforms into a story about moral ambiguity, fractured relationships, and the impossible decisions people make under pressure. As each episode peels back another layer of the mystery, Beal’s score evolves alongside it. One of the key discoveries was embracing the show’s operatic quality. While All Her Fault contains suspense and tragedy, it also contains moments of dark humor and emotional excess. Beal recalls a pivotal scene in which the disappearance begins tearing apart a marriage. Rather than underscoring the moment subtly, he leaned into sweeping strings and heightened emotion. “We decided we’d earned it,” he says. Those strings became the backbone of the score. Knowing the production could support a live string orchestra gave Beal access to an enormous emotional palette, one that could feel Hitchcockian and unsettling one moment, then deeply tragic the next. For Beal, that’s what makes scoring a project like All Her Fault so satisfying. The music isn’t simply accompanying the story. It’s helping reveal it. And as the series progresses from a straightforward kidnapping mystery into something much larger and more emotionally devastating, the score follows every twist, every revelation, and every difficult choice right alongside the audience.