Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bad Sisters’ On Apple TV+, Sharon Horgan’s New Series About Sisters Who May Or May Not Have Killed Their Brother-In-Law

Even though Sharon Horgan is best known for Catastrophe over here in the States, she’s been involved in a number of different series as a writer and producer. The general theme of most of them involve women who are having issues in life. But she’s never written a dark comedy thriller before. Now, under her deal for Apple TV+, she has written a pretty good one.

BAD SISTERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman in an apron approaches her counter and cuts up an onion for finger sandwiches.

The Gist: Grace Williams (Anne-Marie Duff) is somewhat in denial that her husband John Paul (Claes Bang) is dead; he’s actually in his coffin in the next room. She goes to see him and is horrified to see that his corpse has a hard-on.

We see her sisters all in various states of ambivalence about going to his funeral. Eva Garvey (Sharon Horgan) is busy half-watering plants outside her large house, then guzzles wine and takes what looks like a Xanax. Bibi Garvey (Sarah Greene) is taking a soak and needs to be reminded by her wife. Ursula Flynn (Eva Birthistle) is too busy hiding from her husband and kids. And Becka Garvey (Eve Hewson) is literally running late. She’s so oblivious that a guy on a motorcycle wipes out when he tries to avoid her in the road.

Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson) sees that a sizable life insurance claim for John Paul has been filed, and he feels he needs to investigate. He decides that his half-brother Matt (Daryl McCormack) — the guy who wiped out on the motorcycle — should help him. If he pays out this claim, the insurance business their father started will be wiped out, so he has to find something that would prevent a payout.

It certainly seems like none of the Garvey sisters are particularly broken up over John Paul’s death, and a flashback to six months ago shows why. At a Christmas Eve dinner at Eva’s house — the one their parents willed to her upon their untimely death — John Paul is pretty much a prick. He insults just about every sister, is controlling towards Grace, and even objects to a hug from Ursula’s son, who has special needs.

Grace insists she’s happy with John Paul, but he manipulates her into not going for the polar bear swim that she and her sisters have been doing on Christmas Day since they were kids. Her sisters are so concerned that they’re losing Grace, they briefly talk about what they could do to get John Paul out of the picture. Six months later, he is out of the picture, and Grace’s sisters may or may not have had something to do with it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Bad Sisters can certainly fit easily in the “dark comedy about death” category that contained recent shows like Dead To Me and The End.

Our Take: With Horgan at the helm of Bad Sisters (she also wrote the first episode with Brett Baer and David Finkel), you know that most of what we’re going to see is going to be just as dark as it is funny and vice versa. Every show she’s been involved with, whether it’s Catastrophe or things she’s produced like This Way Up or Shining Vale, all involve characters — mostly women — who can only be happy for so long before life deals them another shit sandwich. In Bad Sisters, she’s multiplied that misery by five, but because it’s focused towards one particular twat, it makes for a show that has some real dark comedy potential.

The first episode leans towards the dramatic more than anything else, though it does start off with John Paul’s corpse sporting a chubby, so it’s not all serious. Where the episode shines is in the flashbacks where we see John Paul’s prickishness in action. He just seems to have antipathy towards everyone in Grace’s family, and he shows it in ways that can be passively cruel as well as downright aggressively nasty. But what the sisters hate the most about him is that they’ve made Grace “smaller” in their eyes, and they see her pulling away from them.

The dynamic among the sisters has yet to be explored, but as Eva makes sure her sisters are on the same page with Grace’s lie to Thomas Claffin that she was with them the night John Paul died, she says that we “look out for each other, like we always have.” That dynamic is an important part of this series, mainly because the five Garvey sisters are all different, but life circumstances have created such an unbreakable bond among them that when they see that bond being threatened, they take extreme action.

As the mystery behind John Paul’s death unfolds, especially as the Claffin brothers keep pushing to find something that would deny the life insurance claim, it’ll be fun to see how the sisters rally around each other, and if any of them crack under the pressure.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode, though Becka, looking to escape the funeral reception at a local pub, runs into Matt. They know each other from the accident on the road and take a liking to each other, but Matt has no idea that Becka is one of Grace’s sisters.

Parting Shot: The Garvey sisters sit around a fire outside of Eva’s house and vow to keep their stories straight and tell the “insurance dick,” as Eva calls Thomas, that Grace was with them when John Paul died. They also vow never to let anyone know about what they did.

Sleeper Star: We’re intrigued by Sarah Greene as Bibi, mainly because she is going to be doing all of her scenes with a patch over her right eye. How Bibi lost her eye is something we’d love to find out about, but just the acting job she has to do with only one eye open is something we’re fascinated with.

Most Pilot-y Line: Grace and John Paul’s weird neighbor Roger (Michael Smiley) brings oysters to their house on Christmas Day. He was going to have them with his sister, “but she took a bad fall on the way back from the pub.” Way to bury the headline about your sister’s drunken pratfall, Roger!

Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of Bad Sisters isn’t wall-to-wall funny, but Horgan has created a group of interesting characters who all rally around the fact that their sister is married to a complete prat. And that by itself is what will keep us interested.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.