Watchlist: Pitch-black comedy Bad Sisters is crazy, brilliant

Sharon Horgan’s latest is a wickedly funny take on the female revenge thriller.

Bad Sisters the latest series created by Sharon Horgan. Picture: Supplied

Station Eleven
Stan

You’d be forgiven if a show about a freak flu that wipes out 99 per cent of the human population was not on your agenda on release in 2021, but this isn’t your usual grisly post-apocalyptic fare. In the pastoral apocalypse of Station Eleven, the allure is that life could be improved if our current society were wiped out. Over two timelines — the beginning of the pandemic and 20 years later — it follows survivors, free from modernity, as they build a new world and hold on to the treasured things that have been lost: namely, art. Much of the series revolves around a troupe of theatre performers who travel across the lush Great Lakes performing Shakespeare. The series is based on Emily St John Mandel’s exquisite 2014 novel, and Patrick Somerville, who previously wrote for HBO’s The Leftovers, has, dare it be said, crafted an adaptation that transcends the text.

Maniac
Netflix

While rewatching La La Land, two thoughts struck: 1. Was this movie always this corny? 2. Whatever happened to Emma Stone? On the latter question, it turns out she’s spent most of her post-The Favourite years making children’s films. Good for her, but one hopes a return to projects that aren’t The Croods 2 is imminent. In 2018, she starred in Maniac, a far-out Netflix series from writers Patrick Somerville and Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective). The show is set in a future version of New York City and revolves around two lonely people who embark on a pharmaceutical trial for a drug that claims to take them to the subconscious and do the work of decades of therapy with only three pills. Stone is Annie, a character up-ended by grief and hooked on black market samples from the drug trial that allow her to re-experience a defining trauma. Jonah Hill (in a satisfying Superbad reunion) plays Owen, who has a history of schizophrenic delusions.

Bad Sisters
Apple TV+

From its title sequence, Bad Sisters makes it clear you’re in for something crazy and brilliant. This pitch-black comedy, created by Irish writer Sharon Horgan, known for her biting shows like Pulling and Catastrophe, offers a wickedly funny spin on the popular female revenge premise popularised by Big Little Lies. Set in Dublin, the show revolves around the ordeals of the inseparable Garvey sisters — Grace, Eva, Ursula, Bibi and Becka. Grace is married to the despicable John Paul Williams. This man is the pits — a controlling, cruel, vindictive bully, with lips perpetually curled into a sneer — and has reduced Grace to nothingness. Her sister Eva astutely observes, “She’s getting quieter and smaller”. Then John Paul is dead and the sisters find themselves as prime suspects in the eyes of two life insurance agents.

Irma Vep
Binge

Twenty-six years after Maggie Cheung slinked on to our screens in that vampy latex catsuit, director Olivier Assayas remade his classic 1990s film Irma Vep as an uber-meta HBO miniseries. Alicia Vikander gives a nimble performance (her ballet roots on full display) as Mira, an actor looking to transcend the unfulfilling blockbusters that made her a household name (the series opens during a press tour of her latest film, Doomsday, an IP-driven superhero flick made by a “dime a dozen douche from LA”). She moves to Paris in search of more substantial, challenging work, which leads her to the role of Irma Vep in a TV remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1916 silent classic Les Vampires. Where the original film sniped at the state of the post-New Wave French film industry, Assayas’ gripes here are with a system in which film as an art form is constantly and mercilessly degraded. For the fashion victims, Louis Vuitton creative director Nicolas Ghesquière is the mastermind behind Mira’s costumes, which, it goes without saying, are gorgeous.

Firebite
Airing weekly from Thursday July 6 at 9.30pm on NITV and SBS On Demand

In Firebite, Warwick Thornton uses a madcap vampire story as an allegory for colonisation. The Samson & Delilah director had read that a surgeon on the First Fleet brought 11 phials of variola — the virus that causes smallpox — with him to Sydney Cove. In this series, those phials are imagined as 11 killer vampires who have a taste for Indigenous blood. The story is set in Opal City, a fictional mining town in the South Australian desert. It centres on two Aboriginal vampire killers — Tyson (Rob Collins) and his adopted daughter Shanika (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) — and their battle to safeguard their homeland and community from the clutches of the vampire king (Callan Mulvey). Thornton performed double duty as a cinematographer, and the visuals are spectacular: sweeping shots of the untamed, ochre outback and the pockmarked textures of Coober Pedy’s abandoned mine shafts.