At the center of Apple TV+’s dark comedy-thriller Bad Sisters is the mystery of how John-Paul Williams (Claes Bang), a seemingly respectable husband, father and businessman, really died. Life insurance agents Thomas and Matthew Claffin (Brian Gleeson and Daryl McCormack) suspect foul play, and they’re probably not wrong: As the series quickly establishes, his sisters-in-law were definitely plotting something against JP, though it’ll apparently take the entire ten-episode season to find out exactly what came to pass.
If the how is in question, though, the why certainly isn’t. Within his first five minutes of screentime, JP shows himself to be so thoroughly, irredeemably, aggressively awful that the real puzzle might be how no one else got around to killing him first. In one light, this has the advantage of releasing the audience from any ambivalence we might feel rooting for his comeuppance. But it’s also indicative of a certain shallowness. Bad Sisters is entertaining enough to binge, but it’s too empty to truly satisfy.
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Bad Sisters
Bad Sisters opens on the day of JP’s funeral, attended by plenty of people but few who actually cared for him. Among those gathered are his long-suffering wife Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) and her four sisters: Eva (Sharon Horgan), the responsible eldest; Ursula (Eva Birthistle), a nurse and mother; Bibi (Sarah Greene), the acerbic hothead of the bunch; and Becka (Eve Hewson), the sweet but flighty baby of the family. Eventually, the event is also crashed by the Claffin brothers, in search of evidence that might nullify JP’s hefty claim.
From there, the show jumps between two timelines — one chronicling the six months leading up to JP’s demise, and another tracking the Claffins’ haphazard investigation. As with Big Little Lies, which Bad Sisters echoes in premise if not necessarily in quality, the “mystery” is really just the show’s writers (including star and co-creator Horgan, who adapted from Malin-Sarah Gozin’s Belgian series Clan) obscuring facts already known to most of the main characters — not that it’s going to leave a viewer any less curious about the solution.
Bad Sisters is never boring. With so many moving parts, there’s always some fresh detail to be unearthed in flashbacks or some new scheme for the characters to cook up and execute. As the Garvey sisters’ plans to neutralize JP go awry in increasingly elaborate ways, their pitch-black comedy deepens: “I swear to God you’d have an easier time offing the bloody Road Runner,” Eva gripes at one point. The wry humor and literal life-or-death stakes are underlined by a soundtrack heavy on folk-y Americans (Townes Van Zandt, Nancy Sinatra). And it’s frequently quite beautiful to look at, thanks to a small-town Ireland setting that offers ink-blue waters, flower-dotted fields and charming cottages perched on rolling slopes.
Its greatest strength of all is an unimpeachable cast. The Garveys have already lost their parents by the time we meet them, and Horgan’s shrewd, solid presence makes her believable as the rock that’s kept the remaining family members together in the face of tragedy. Duff seems to shrink bit by bit before our eyes under the accumulated weight of JP’s cruelties, which Bang makes extra odious through his restraint. His JP will scream and shout when he has to, but he knows he can do just as much damage with a sly backhanded compliment delivered in a conciliatory murmur.
Yet in the seven hours sent to critics, Bad Sisters feels slightly less than the sum of its parts. JP’s utter toxicity is the foundation on which the rest of the series is built — it’s what ruins the sisters’ lives, what spurs them into decisive and destructive action, what has them anxiously coordinating the half-truths to tell the insurance men in the fallout. Great swaths of time indeed are spent watching JP sabotage, harass and abuse every one in his orbit. He’s the sort of man who’ll threaten someone else’s marriage or livelihood just because he can, who brings his wife champagne solely so he can insist she’s too drunk to leave the house, who’ll leave the toilet unflushed as a petty fuck-you to the next person at the party who needs to use it. It can be exhausting and deeply unpleasant to sit through, even with the knowledge that payback is just around the corner.
He sucks up so much air that there’s not always enough of it left for anything else. Bibi and Ursula’s family lives get pushed to the side, and Eva and Becka’s romantic prospects are folded back into the mystery. The fiercely loyal bond between the Garveys is never in doubt, and it’s evident in the way they tease each other over wine at Eva’s or giggle over murderous fantasies after a swim, long before one of them voices what could be their mission statement: “Someone’s not coming out the other side of this. And it’s not going to be me and it’s sure as shit not going to be one of my sisters.”
But it’s a simplistic, static connection. They love each other, they hate their common enemy, and the nuances get swallowed up by those extremes. Even the Claffins get a more complex dynamic with far less screen time, with Matthew and Thomas frequently at odds over the merit of their investigation or the legacy of their late father.
Bad Sisters does get knottier as it goes, and the seventh chapter ends with a reveal that suggests a much more sinister turn ahead. There could yet be puzzle pieces that deepen the characters and themes, that make the Garveys’ mission more urgent or complicate their relationships to each other and to JP. In the meantime, though, it’s a bit of an oddity — easy to breeze through but a little too mordant to be sincere, a little too heavy to be hilarious, a little too sour to be purely fun.
