Bad Sisters

John Paul ‘JP’ Williams (Claes Bang) is dead, and his wife Grace Reilly (Anne-Marie Duff) is burying him on the coast outside Dublin while her four sisters stand at the grave and fail to look sorry. Eva Garvey (Sharon Horgan), Ursula Flynn (Eva Birthistle), Bibi Garvey (Sarah Greene) and Becka Garvey (Eve Hewson) have wanted him gone for years, and the series runs on two tracks: the months in which they tried to arrange it, and the weeks afterwards in which two brothers from a failing insurance firm, Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson) and Matt Claffin (Daryl McCormack), go looking for a reason not to pay. Horgan made it with Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, from the Flemish series Clan, and the ten episodes began on 19 August 2022. It is funny, well acted and properly frightening, and about two episodes longer than it needs to be.

The frightening part is Bang. JP calls his wife “Mammy” in front of company, decides what she wears and where the money goes, and keeps a small, patient cruelty in reserve for each of her sisters. He does not shout. He explains, kindly, why they are wrong, and then makes sure of it. We were frightened of him inside two scenes, and it was not a threat that did it but the way Duff’s Grace laughs a beat after he does, having checked his face first. Some critics found him a cartoon. We think a man who is never once wrong in his own house is exactly what this monster looks like from inside, and Bang never winks.

The sisters are the reason to watch. Horgan gives Eva the tiredness of the one who has always been in charge. Birthistle’s Ursula has a husband, Donal Flynn (Jonjo O’Neill), who deserves better. Greene’s Bibi wants JP dead and says so. Hewson’s Becka is a mess in a way the writing allows to be charming. They swim together off the rocks in the cold, they talk over each other, and the scripts, by Horgan and eight other writers, trust that four women arguing in a kitchen is worth as much as a plot turn. It usually is. When they are together we laughed more than at most comedies that were only trying to be comedies.

Seven cinematographers and eight editors worked across the ten episodes, and we could not tell you where one handed over to the next. The coast is shot in grey and green with the sea nearly always in the corner of the frame, and Candida Otton and Mark Geraghty’s design draws the line the story needs: the Garvey family house is old, cluttered and warm, JP’s is glass, stone and hard light. Camille Benda keeps Grace in pale, careful clothes that look chosen for her. Over the titles PJ Harvey sings Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who By Fire’ while a house of ordinary objects turns itself into a set of traps, and it sets the tone better than any scene. Harvey and Tim Phillips’s score under the episodes is sparer.

What does not work is the second track. Gleeson and McCormack are good company, and Matt’s romance with Becka is played sweetly by two actors who know it is a bad idea, but the insurance plot exists to give the flashbacks a reason and keeps having to be reminded of it. Thomas’s wife Theresa Claffin (Seána Kerslake) is pregnant and the firm is broke, and we are told so more often than is useful. The sisters’ attempts on JP settle into a rhythm of plan, botch and regroup that the writers vary less than they think, and by the eighth hour we were counting how many remained. Ten episodes is a long time to keep one man alive on purpose.

This is broader and more plotted than Catastrophe, and it is Horgan’s most generous ensemble: Michael Smiley, as JP’s neighbour Roger Muldoon, gets a strand about a lonely, decent man we did not expect and would not lose. Most critics rate it about where we do. The few who found the thriller thin have a point. It is not the part we came for.

It is a 15 certificate, for the language and for what JP does. Watch two episodes at a time, with someone who has a sister. It ends where it should.