The first season of Bad Sisters, a jet black comedy drama that merrily veered between farcical and empathetic, was a revelation when it aired in 2022. Sharon Horgan’s masterful adaption of the 2012 Belgium source material Clan transplanted the action to Ireland. There, the Garvey siblings devised a succession of backfiring schemes to kill their monstrous brother-in-law John Paul AKA The Prick (Claes Bang), who had reduced his wife Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) to emotional rubble. As the BAFTA-winning first season ended perfectly – the whodunnit revealed (spoiler alert!) that it was Grace who staged The Prick’s suicide – a looming question hangs over season two: how do you expand the show beyond its roots without diminishing returns?
Fortunately the chaotic world of the Garveys has more pricks than the stomach of an Ozempic addict. Series two opens with a stock mystery shot of four Garveys attempting to remove a body from the boot of a car before disposing it over a perilous cliff edge. After this brief tease, we jump backwards in time and find the siblings thriving. In the two years that have elapsed since The Prick’s demise, Grace has got remarried to the ostensibly-perfect Ian (Owen McDonnell) after the pair met in a grief support group, Eva (Horgan) is sober and has enlisted a “menopause coach” while pill-popping nurse Ursula (Eva Birthistle) is taking divorce in her stride. The youngest and most fiery Garvey Becka (Eve Hewson) is navigating a blossoming relationship with nice-guy Joe while mordant eye-patch-clad Bibi (Sarah Greene) is planning another baby with her wife Nora (Yasmine Akram).
We know this calm won’t last forever though. It isn’t long before detective inspector Loftus (Barry Ward) and his idealistic new partner Houlihan (Sex Education’s Thaddea Graham) come a-knocking after a dismembered body in a suitcase bubbles up from a pond. Grace then makes a confession to her new husband that causes a chain reaction of conspiracy.
Season two also has to deal with the absence of a loathsome villain following the demise of Bang’s The Prick. Enter new antagonist Angelica, an oddball pious busybody played gleefully by Killing Eve’s Fiona Shaw, who latches firmly onto the Garveys. Just when you think Bad Sisters is getting comfortable, a screeching emotional turn happens in the second episode that sets the show on a defiant new path and upends the well-observed, layered family dynamic.
Though still darkly funny and packed with one-liners, the tone this time around is bleaker and less manic than what’s come before. The sisters crawl through the barbed-wire aftermath of The Prick’s death and deal with a wilderness of grief while the tightly-wound plot twists and turns its way to uncovering whose body ended up in the boot of their car. Bad Sisters season two might not quite capture the bottled-lightning originality of season one but it offers enough intrigue, brash boldness and spark to render it a compelling watch.
‘Bad Sisters’ season two is out now via Apple TV+