This post contains spoilers for Bad Sisters Season 2, Episode 7.
Few countries seem so comfortable with death as Ireland. The nation that gave the world the Irish wake doesn’t shy away from confronting death or speak in whispers about it like its Anglo-Saxon cousins; instead, its denizens place their dead front and center in their homes and gather with scores of people—some of whom may not even have known the deceased—to mourn as a community. Young children learn early that death is just another part of life. Death quite literally brings the Irish together.
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Bad Sisters, the breakout Apple TV+ hit now in its second season, should be so consumed with death—and that it should feel so comfortable finding humor in it. The show’s black comic tone won over critics and viewers in its first outing as the bumbling Garvey sisters each plotted to murder John Paul (Claes Bang), the comically evil husband of their most innocent sibling Grace (Anne-Marie Duff). We knew right away that John Paul would die because the show opened—where else?—at his wake. The unique pleasure and suspense came from finding out exactly how the Prick, as he was known to the Garveys, would meet his end and at whose hand. But there was also an undeniable chemistry between the four central women—a soothing sisterhood that felt like a balm to John Paul’s misogyny.
So I wasn’t too surprised when Apple announced that a second season was in the works, despite the show’s having been originally sold as a miniseries that had wrapped up its plotlines. I wasn’t too mad either—after all, spending more time with the Garvey sisters can feel like a comfort. Theirs is an Ireland where it’s always sunny, no one has to work, and a cup of tea is always brewing.
And yet the more I’ve watched this second season of Bad Sisters, the more perplexed and annoyed I’ve felt at its very existence. The show has become so consumed with exploring guilt and shame—two other wonderful Irish Catholic traditions—that it’s lost much of the spark that made it feel so unique. There’s Grace’s guilt and shame at killing John Paul, Eva’s (Sharon Horgan) guilt and shame at falling for Grace’s new husband Ian (Owen McDonnell), Ursula’s (Eva Birthistle) guilt and shame at possibly being responsible for Grace’s death, Bibi’s (Sarah Greene) guilt and shame at hiding her real feelings about having another child with her wife, and Becka’s (Eve Hewson) guilt and shame at not being certain if she wants a child at all with her new partner while she’s still attracted to her ex. Instead of being a fresh and funny whodunit, Bad Sisters has become a more pedestrian soap opera. The whole thing has felt, in a word, unnecessary. I didn’t care if the Garvey sisters got away with John Paul’s death in Season 1; I just cared that he was dead! Putting these poor sisters through the wringer—or, in Grace’s case, through her car’s windshield—has started to feel like the bigger crime.
My main gripe with this season has been its overreliance on twists in order to keep the story moving. Because the show has abandoned its source material (the 2012 Belgian series Clan), it no longer has its ingenious ready-made structure of flashbacks and flash-forwards, nor its building introductions to each sister as they are brought into the murderous plot one by one. Instead, the show’s creators—who include Horgan—have tried to keep the drama high with a series of surprises. First, there was Grace’s sudden death in the second episode, then the infamous sailboat boom that knocked Angelica (Fiona Shaw) out to sea at the end of Episode 5—a moment that felt more shocking to me than Grace’s car crash. Now, after Episode 7, we can add two more: Angelica is, inexplicably, still alive despite spending days in the freezing Irish Sea, and, in an even more stunning twist, Ian is not at all who he claimed to be. Instead, he’s Cormac Sweeney, an ex-cop turned scheming con artist who has a whole second family (it’s his first family, to be fair) stashed up in Donegal, and his wife is apparently aware that he’s a bigamist who cheats women in order to fund a gambling addiction. Talk about a prick!
But this latest reveal feels completely jarring, like a boom to the face. What’s more, it’s unearned. Aside from Bibi’s comments at the end of Episode 6 about Ian apparently not having any of his own friends or family present at his wedding to Grace—information that wasn’t ever mentioned in the wedding episode; I went back and checked!—and Angelica’s vague warnings about him before going overboard, nothing in the series has really prepared us for this Scooby-Doo villain mask to be ripped off. Maybe that’s Horgan’s point: In a world full of misogyny, men, even the “nice” ones, should never be trusted; you can count only on your sisters. If that’s the message, though, it feels like a lazy one, or at least one that’s been lazily delivered.
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It’s easy to see this season of Bad Sisters as the third sibling of Broadchurch and Big Little Lies, two other murder-mystery miniseries that returned for more after huge success. (Shaw’s Angelica, in particular, feels like the spiritual successor to Meryl Streep’s Mary Louise in Big Little Lies: a pious, nosy, and suffocating bitch—or “wagon,” to employ the Irish term used here—who asks one too many questions and causes trouble for our heroines.) But, just like both of those shows, Bad Sisters feels as if it has lost its way in its second outing, muddling through a maze of grief that is sometimes moving but more often plain maudlin.
That’s the thing about mourning the dead: It’s easy to make light of a prick like John Paul kicking the bucket, but it’s much harder for a black comedy to keep things relatively light when its primary source of grief is for someone whose name is literally Grace. Perhaps Bad Sisters should have kept in line with one of the traditions of an Irish wake and simply stopped the clock at the moment Season 1 reached its natural end.
