Ireland hasn’t done particularly well out of television’s streaming revolution. The rise of Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+ has provided work for actors, directors and writers, but precious little of the country has been seen on the screen. When it has, cliche is piled atop cliche. A rare bright light amid the blarney has been Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters (Apple TV+ from Wednesday), a thriller about a quintet of siblings who bump off a loathsome brother-in-law which, when it arrived on Apple two years ago, had the core mission of celebrating the poshest parts of coastal Dublin.
This was a love letter that expressed its feelings about the Dart-line and its glorious hinterland via vast fitted kitchens and bespoke windows so huge and glittering you pictured Dermot Bannon in front of his television self-combusting from sheer glee and vindication. Here was a universe where the housing crisis was a bad dream and the big hand always chimed wine o’clock.
That vibe remains intact as the series returns for a second season, with Horgan rejoined by her divine sisterhood of leads in Eve Hewson, Sarah Greene, Eva Birthistle and Anne-Marie Duff. Unfolding in a dreamy mash-up of Malahide, Howth, Skerries and Dalkey, the show argues that there is no better backdrop in the world for middle-class skulduggery than the sun-kissed expanse of Dublin Bay.
The obvious comparison is the Nicole Kidman-Reese Witherspoon murder mystery Big Little Lies, which argued that coastal California was like living inside a huge scented candle. Bad Sisters pulls off the aspirational, Agatha Christie-does-Nigella Lawson mood with similar élan. But there is substance to go with the style, and season two does well in unpicking the tricky conundrum of continuing a story done and dusted in 2022.
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Bad Sisters was adapted by Horgan from a Belgian miniseries, Clan, and originally intended as a one-off. Bringing it back means asking what happened after Eva Garvey (Horgan) and sisters Becka (Hewson), Bibi (Greene) and Ursula (Birthistle) conspired to bump off horrible John Paul (Claes Bang) – the controlling and manipulative, husband of fifth sibling Grace (Anne-Marie Duff).
The answer is that a body has appeared which could connect the Garveys to John Paul’s demise. But it is the living rather than the dead who, in the short term at least, pose the bigger headache. Grace’s former neighbour Roger (Michael Smiley) has now moved in with his nosy sister Angelica (Fiona Shaw – pulling off the small-town curtain twitcher to perfection). Roger is aware of how John Paul met his maker, and Angelica – Shaw’s performance feels like a riff on Meryl Streep in Big Little Lies – has her suspicions, too. More than suspicions – she gatecrashes Grace’s wedding to cheerily oafish Ian (Owen McDonnell) and is soon tiptoeing around the house, peering through keyholes and eavesdropping on the Garveys.
The body in a suitcase has also attracted the attention of the gardaí. Barry Ward returning as Detective Inspector Fergal Loftus and is joined by rookie detective Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), who displays a disturbing eagerness – in Fergal’s cynical eyes – to get the job gone (he’d rather be on the golf course).
It’s hard to be objective about television set in Ireland. Either you nitpick it to death or are too tickled pink at the presence of recognisable places – oh look, Skerries! – to recognise the flaws. Yet even with that caveat, it is hard to see Bad Sisters series two as anything other than another compelling serving of dark comedy – with the chemistry between the cast every bit as zinging as in season one. You’d watch even if it wasn’t set in Ireland, but what a bonus that it is.
