Sharon Horgan, the creator, writer, executive producer and star of Bad Sisters, couldn’t let go of the lead characters so has brought them back for a second season, available now on Apple TV+. Photo / M10s, NurPhoto, AFP
Sharon Horgan, the creator, writer, executive producer and star of Bad Sisters, couldn’t let go of the lead characters so has brought them back for a second season, available now on Apple TV+. Photo / M10s, NurPhoto, AFP
The Emmy-nominated star and co-creator decided it would be “almost criminal” to deprive her characters of a second season.
Bad Sisters wasn’t supposed to have a second season. Based on the Belgian series Clan, the black comedy on Apple TV Plus – about siblings in Dublinwho plot to kill their sister’s abusive husband – wrapped its murder mystery two years ago on a rather final note. Its 10 episodes were cleanly written, loose ends snipped or tucked back into the ball of yarn. The critically acclaimed show won a Peabody Award and landed four Emmy nominations.
And yet, just a few months into producing that first season, co-creator and star Sharon Horgan was already thinking about what she would do with a second. Then, just a few weeks after that first season’s finale aired, Apple renewed the series. Plans for a limited run flew out the window once it became clear Horgan, who developed the show with Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, had more to say about deep-seated misogyny and the lasting effects of abuse.
“You create characters and it does seem almost criminal to let them go after a first season,” Horgan said in a recent Zoom interview. “I said, ‘Well, if we can do it right, I’d do it again’. Because the other thing about the show going down well is, you don’t want to f*** it up by going again.”
Horgan might be best known for creating and starring with Rob Delaney in Catastrophe, a sitcom offering a remarkably unpolished look at modern marriage and parenting. The Irish multi-hyphenate broke out on British TV in the 2000s with the witty BBC series Pulling, about a trio of 30-something women navigating single life in London.
Horgan considers Bad Sisters, which returned Wednesday to Apple’s streaming platform, to be her most genre-bending work yet. It plays as a straight comedy when the sisters bicker, a drama when they grieve, a thrilling caper when they set out on a risky mission. The absurdity binding the scenes allows Horgan to “really push the envelope” with how she tests her characters’ survival instincts, she said. Last season’s revenge fantasy plot explored what angry women are capable of doing when they are pushed to their limits. This season, which departs from the source material, wonders what repercussions those women may encounter.
Apple renewed Bad Sisters just weeks after its first season’s finale aired. Photo / Thenews2, M10s, NurPhoto, AFP
A quick refresher (with spoilers, of course): The series left off with the five Garveys – Eva (Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson) – getting away with murder. Whereas her sisters try but fail, Grace ends up being the one to successfully kill husband John Paul (Claes Bang) and stages it as a horrible accident. She is found out by Thomas and Matt Claffin (Brian Gleeson and Daryl McCormack), a pair of brothers whose family business holds John Paul’s life insurance policy. The Claffins work overtime to prove the Garveys’ involvement in John Paul’s death as a means of saving their failing company, but they eventually strike a deal – the brothers will keep Grace’s secret so long as she doesn’t file the hefty insurance claim.
John Paul, a raging misogynist, was a cathartic villain for Horgan to write. He stood in for a lifetime of “bigoted white men telling us what to do”, she said. The new episodes pick up two years later, when the Garveys face a harsh reality: though John Paul is now long dead, the systems that enabled his toxic behaviour are thriving. The show digs into institutional sexism by introducing a young female police detective, Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), who suspects something was awry with the previous investigation of John Paul’s death but must fight her male colleagues to reopen the case. The Garveys are treated as hysterical women by those colleagues. The impact of John Paul’s abuse lingers in how they struggle to trust themselves, or even each other.
Grace finds love again and marries a mild-mannered man named Ian (Owen McDonnell), but their honeymoon period doesn’t last long: “I really, desperately wanted to see a happy Grace at the start,” Horgan said. “But I also wanted to be true to the situation. She killed the man she once loved. She killed the father of her child. It’s not something she’s just going to get over.”
(From left): Sharon Horgan, Eve Hewson, Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene in Bad Sisters. Photo / Apple TV+
Eva, the oldest, has spent a lifetime looking out for her younger sisters. She reveals to them in the first season that John Paul once raped her, a difficult admission that allows her to feel “like a weight lifted”, Horgan said. The second season finds Eva thinking more about herself. “I wanted to explore what that looks like to a woman who’s hitting 50 and perimenopausal and single with disposable income,” Horgan continued. “I wanted to put her in a place where she felt in charge of her destiny.”
Ursula, whose marriage falls apart after John Paul exposes her affair in the first season, must learn to navigate life as a newly single woman. Bibi, the sister Horgan said was “the most intent” on killing John Paul, struggles to return her full attention to the marriage she sidelined for so long. Becka, the baby of the family, comes to terms with the fact she can’t be coddled forever. (Her romantic relationship with Matt Claffin crumbles after the first season, and she struggles to connect with a new partner.)
Without John Paul, there is no clear villain throughout the new run. The Garveys find lots to dislike about a new character named Angelica (Fiona Shaw), a religious woman who needles her way into Grace’s life after meeting her at a grief group. But as bigoted as she may be, Angelica reveals just as much about the Garveys’ own biases. Sometimes they are their own worst enemies.
Life can still be terrible after a “fairy-tale ending”, Horgan said. “The ghost of John Paul and that awful, terrible situation … felt very real and true to me.” While the Garveys might be more prone to life-altering catastrophe than most families, their feelings of extreme anguish, temporary anger and lasting solidarity resonate. Horgan returned to Bad Sisters to tell an honest story.
“I’m drawn to showing how real women deal with living in this … world,” she said, “and being truthful about it and seeing how far that gets me without having to make apologies for it.”
