Week-to-Week: The 4-Month Late Take on Bad Sisters You Didn’t Know To Ask For

Is a take ever late in an age of Peak TV? A fair question for a jet-lagged flight watcher

Photo: Apple TV+

Note that, yes, this four-month-late take on a show will spoil it, so if you still haven’t gotten around to it, steer clear.

While everyone who isn’t traveling is diving into a new murder mystery show with Poker Face—which Josh Spiegel is covering weekly here at Episode Medium—I took some time on the plane to finish up the first season of another recent take on the genre of sorts. That said, Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters is a curious case of a murder mystery.

On the one hand, yes, the show is built around filling in a crucial piece of information: how John Paul Williams, easily one of the most singularly detestable television characters, actually died. We begin with his funeral, and it’s quickly clear that the eponymous sisters are concerned about any kind of investigation revealing their own involvement.

The flashbacks that frame this story initially begin as an origin story of the plot to kill John Paul, but after the first failed attempt the show settles into a rhythm independent of any type of mystery. As each new murder plot is raised, the information we do have—the state of his body—effectively rules them out. We know he didn’t die in an explosion at the cabin, or likely by having a frozen paintball pellet shot through the hole in his skull. The early attempt at poisoning was certainly feasible, but at that point it became clear that the herrings were all going to be red right up until they weren’t.

The show, released episodically last year but new-to-me on my recent travels, effectively becomes a “murder attempt of the week,” using the procedural dynamics of plotting to kill someone as a way into the show’s characters. As each sister gets pulled deeper into the plot, their motives for wanting him dead intensify. It’s almost to the point of overkill: I was ready to see the man die after a single episode, but each new hour comes with a new hateful action, to the point I was audibly suppressing rage behind my mask to the confusion of the passengers next to me.

I don’t know that John Paul needed to be as freshly horrific in each subsequent episode, but it’s part of a larger effort to maintain momentum in a story that knows it’s going to lose it. See, the more failed attempts we see, the clearer it becomes that none of them actually killed John Paul. By the time you reach the finale, each character has been forced to face consequences for their actions, whether in the death of an innocent dog, the Hannibal-esque injury to a paintball employee, or the tragic loss of a woman with dementia (aka Becca froze her to death). The show is about their reckoning with their respective reasons for wanting John Paul dead, countless as they were, and by the time we reach the finale that’ve already achieved that development.

Which is why my mind, independent of the weekly chatter you’d likely have seen in weekly coverage of the show or social media conversations, was wandering away from the sisters ahead of the finale’s reveal that it was Grace who killed her own husband after learning he had raped Eva a decade earlier. For the audience, it’s one last piece of the putrid puzzle, the final nail in a coffin basically full of nails at this point. But for Grace, it was a shock to her system, a guttural reaction to what has been staring her in the face the whole time. And in her effort to hide her crime, she suppresses it again, only emerging to the surface when Matt shows up at her doorstep to probe the idea that maybe, just maybe, J.P. was a literal monster who deserved to die a dozen times over.

It’s the only resolution that lets the finale feel like it’s playing a new note, albeit a tonally similar one. The preceding episodes start seeding this development by throwing more suspicion onto both Ben and Roger, only the latter of whom ends up being involved in the crime at all. But it’s a satisfying conclusion because despite the show never giving us enough clues to figure out on our own given we don’t know the specific circumstances of J.P.’s death, it reveals that all this time there were other characters (Grace and Roger) who had been wrestling with their own corner of this twisted tale. It’s not a full-scale retelling of what we knew before (ala Glass Onion): it’s just a grace note (pun obviously intended, this is a society) on a thematic through line the show dealt with in its cycle of attempted murder and justifications for said attempted murders.

While the show certainly adds more shades to the Garvey sisters amidst this process, the show’s title is clear that they’re not perfect, and we naturally root for them to both succeed and get away with it from the word go—these are not, even with the affairs and the like, anti-heroines. But in order for the show’s balance to work, it needs us to be equally invested in the Claffin & Sons investigation into the claim, which we naturally want to fail, but needs to offer its own dynamics.

Putting aside the Romeo & Juliet of it all for a second (I’m never against attractive people with chemistry doing attractive things), I do think they showed their hand a bit too much as soon as they revealed that the deceased patriarch had swindled his clients, and the real crisis was that the policy was never filed and Thomas is due to go to jail for fraud. The solution was just too plain: of course they’d come to an arrangement where they wouldn’t call in the claim, allowing the Claffins to continue hiding/rectifying their situation. As much as the show gets points for “going there” in cases like Minna’s death, the idea of a resolution that involved the sisters in jail or a new father carted off to prison just…didn’t seem plausible.

Of course, this was with the knowledge that they’re making more. It’s fun to come to a “Limited Series turned Ongoing Series” after that decision has already been made, because you naturally start to see things through that lens. There’s obviously some loose ends in the numerous cases of attempted murder and the insurance fraud in question, but Big Little Lies-ing this and just making a second season about them once more chasing their past crimes seems like it has limited runway. The resulting character dynamics and the general Irish charm of the piece can absolutely be deployed differently, but to my mind a non-linear murder-y mystery-y affair seems like it would be blood from a stone. But I was certainly charmed enough to see what Horgan and Co. come up with, and I’m imagining we’ll be discussing it here when it comes around either late this year or early next (probably the latter).

Stray observations

• No, but seriously, I was shaking with rage so many times watching this on planes, it was truly a scene.

• Chekhov’s Bedridden Pregnant Woman strikes again.

• I’m absolutely comfortable with the idea that this was a comedy in the end for categorization purposes, but Horgan really did end up creating a helluva dramatic arc by the time we roll around to the finale.

• Of the various mini-mysteries, I have to say that Gabriel’s estrangement from Eva didn’t work: I don’t buy that he’d believe she would actually tell J.P. knowing what he did about him, and the entire idea of him being closeted at work felt out-of-time with the rest of the story.

• I also watched Peacock’s U.S. reality stars vs. peons take on The Traitors on my first set of flights, which I found very watchable, even if I wish I hadn’t been able to download the whole thing before my flight. This really had to be weekly, which would have accentuated both my horror and joy in the final result.

• I’ve got the rest of Yellowjackets S1 and whatever I can access in Netflix/Disney+ at my next destination for the final legs of my journey, so you can look for my feelings about the former in the comments in Ben’s ongoing remindercaps of S1.