‘It’s genius’: Scheming sisters and a shock twist make for gripping TV

Bad Sisters
★★★★★

A pitch-black comedy centred on a manipulative, abusive misogynist is an audacious premise, but in the hands of Sharon Horgan, star and showrunner of this 10-part series, it’s a genius combination.

A female-led, Irish re-imagining of the 2012 Belgian series The Out-Laws, Bad Sisters focuses on the five Garvey sisters. Eva (Sharon Horgan) is the oldest, and took on a maternal role when the girls’ parents died in a car accident years earlier.

The stars of Bad Sisters (from left): Eve Hewson, Sharon Horgan, Anne-Marie Duff, Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene.Credit: Apple TV+

Then there’s Bibi (Sarah Greene), a former crossbow champion still bitter after losing an eye in a car accident, and Ursula (Eva Birthistle), a nurse and mother of three who is having an affair with her photography teacher.

Becka (Eve Hewson) is the youngest sister, tired of being babied, and Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) is married to Jean-Paul (Danish actor Claes Bang), an arrogant controlling man referred to by the other sisters as The Prick.

The first episode opens with JP’s funeral, but it’s only Grace who is mourning. The many, varied reasons the Garvey sisters have for despising JP are revealed as the story plays out between flashbacks and the present day.

Claes Bang is brilliantly repulsive as the toxic JP.Credit: Natalie Seery

The sisters have long worried about JP’s treatment of Grace (who he creepily calls Mammy) — which includes coercive behaviour, gaslighting and trying to drive a wedge between her and her sisters — and can see him now doing the same to their teenage daughter Blanaid (Saise Quinn), whom he casually fat-shames.

JP’s monstrousness is revealed throughout the flashbacks, and as the story progresses, his behaviour is increasingly nasty. He taunts Eva about her infertility and agrees to invest in Becka’s business before pulling the plug at the 11th hour, claiming he’d made no such promise. He knows about Ursula’s affair and has an incriminating photo of her that he threatens to show her husband.

He even fabricates a story about his neighbour being a child abuser. And that’s not the half of it.

After another unpleasant family gathering, followed by JP engineering it so that Grace can’t meet the sisters for a swim in the Irish Sea (a family tradition), Eva and Bibi joke about killing him. Slowly, their jokes turn to a serious plan.

But JP is a hard man to kill, and the sisters come up with scheme after scheme to free Grace. “He’s harder to kill than the Roadrunner,” remarks Eva after another foiled attempt. Things could tip easily into farce, but Horgan and the writers have created an incredible balance of dark wit with a serious depiction of an abuser.

We know from the outset that JP is dead, so the tension is more how than who. Complicating matters in the present day is insurance broker Tom (Brian Gleeson), whose father has run their firm into the ground and can’t afford to pay out JP’s policy. He suspects foul play — which would negate the policy — and sets about interrogating the family, aided by his half-brother Matt (Daryl McCormack), who tangles the web further by starting a relationship with Becka before either of them knew who the other was.

Despite so many characters, every one of the brilliantly cast actors is wholly realised; the sisters bicker and banter like the real thing, and Bad Sisters is as much poignant familial portrait as dark thriller. It’s genuinely gripping, replete with a shock twist, and Claes Bang as the toxic JP is incredible and utterly repulsive.

Bad Sisters is streaming on Apple TV+.

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