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AppleTV+ 'Bad Sisters': Sharon Horgan's murderously funny, dark comedy can't be missed

The “who done it?” entertainment genre is certainly flooded with options but nothing quite matches the witty, smart, comedic but heartbreaking tone of Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters on AppleTV+, also starring Anne-Marie Duff, Eve Hewson, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Claes Bang.

Set in Ireland, the series starts with John Paul Williams (Bang) dead in a casket in his home, with his widow Grace (Duff) looking over the body and noticing he has an erection, which she tries to hide with a few items around the house. That first scene sets the tone for the comedy that Horgan, who serves as an actor, writer and executive producer on Bad Sisters, is bringing to the table in this show.

Anne-Marie Duff, Saise Quinn, Sharon Horgan, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Eve Hewson in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.
Anne-Marie Duff, Saise Quinn, Sharon Horgan, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Eve Hewson in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.

Going back in time to before John Paul's death, Bad Sister is focused on the Garvey sisters, Grace, Eva (Horgan), Becka (Hewson), Bibi (Greene) and Ursula (Birthistle). They’re very close and have a lot of fun together, but there’s a serious issue at play, Grace is in an abusive marriage with John Paul and he goes to great lengths to try to keep the sisters away from his wife.

As the stakes get higher and anger rises, Grace’s sisters start to seriously think, how terrible would it be if John Paul was dead, specifically, how bad would it be if they killed him?

Told in both the past, before John Paul’s death, and the present, we see how terrible he was as a husband, and just a human, while the present-day story is led by two insurance agents, brothers Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson) and Matthew (Daryl McCormack), who are trying to unearth how John Paul actually died.

Bad Sisters is an adaptation of the Belgian series Clan, created by Malin-Sarah Gozin, and while Horgan is certainly a comedic icon from her work on Pulling, Catastrophe and Motherland, to name a few, she was eager to take on such a “wild” story about this family.

“I think what first attracted me, it was just the inherent premise of it, because I found it really wild and I felt like I hadn't seen anything like that in a while, something that was almost cartoonish, like the Road Runner and the Coyote constantly trying over and over and over again to kill this man,” Horgan told Yahoo Canada. “Beyond that, it was the sisters in the Belgian version, you just couldn't take your eyes off them, you just loved being around this gaggle of women, they just have this real sort of force, they were so strong and so badass.”

“I'd never adapted anything before,...the reason why I thought there was a point in doing it was I felt that I could sort of take that story and just really raise the stakes, just really push the idea of what these sisters are doing and why they're doing it, and why they need to save their sister."

Claes Bang and Anne-Marie Duff in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.
Claes Bang and Anne-Marie Duff in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.

'It still keeps me awake at night, honestly cold sweats'

The ability for Sharon Horgan to pair insanely laugh-out-loud comedy, while tackling the very serious issue of domestic abuse with so much grace, really makes Bad Sisters stand out and keeps you thoroughly engaged in the development of all facets of this story.

“In the U.K., the rates of domestic abuse went through the roof in the lockdown, there were women literally imprisoned with their attackers who were their husbands or their lovers or boyfriends, and I thought, sometimes a really good way to tell a story is to wrap it up in entertainment and sort of trojan horse that more difficult subject matter,” Horgan said.

“It still keeps me awake at night, honestly cold sweats, the responsibility of taking that subject matter seriously, but also really wanting to make people laugh, it's a tricky thing… Some things that you think are going to work almost feel too bleak and you need to sort of reorder things, and you need to bring back in some lightness because the last thing you want to do is to scare your audience, you want them to come along for the ride, and it is entertainment, and there's an element of escapism.”

From Anne-Marie Duff’s perspective, playing Grace and exhibiting the complexities of her relationship with John Paul was a welcome challenge for the actor.

“When we meet Grace she's desperately grieving the loss of her husband but it's been a marriage that has been fantastically coercive, it's very controlling, and abusive, and she's a sort of lost soul,” Duff told Yahoo Canada. “She has become this weird kind of permeable membrane, she's constantly trying to be what she thinks he wants her to be and she has no real sense of herself.”

“As an actor, the luxury and the dream, the goal, is to play as many different versions of a woman as possible, and so I'm always trying to find territory that I haven't charted before, I've never played a woman at this point in her life, at a real tipping point.”

Sarah Greene, Sharon Horgan and Eve Hewson in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.
Sarah Greene, Sharon Horgan and Eve Hewson in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.

'She has an enormous deep, terrible kind of love for him'

Where Bad Sisters absolutely succeeds is taking you on the journey to the point where you’re thinking, “I absolutely agree, this prick should be killed,” going against your more reasonable logic.

“The challenge, of course, is for the audience to hate him so much and want to rescue her so much that they then go, ‘yes, kill him’...it's sort of vital that, that seems true, not a pastiche or a caricature,…it had to feel genuine,” Anne-Marie Duff said.

“He withholds from her emotionally, sexually, financially, but when she's talking to her sisters she's saying, ‘I still find him as attractive as I did when I first met him,’ she has an enormous deep, terrible kind of love for him,” Sharon Horgan added.

Claes Bang in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.
Claes Bang in “Bad Sisters,” premiering globally August 19, 2022 on Apple TV+.

'We cast an attractive man and it was completely deliberate'

When it came to casting for Claes Bang as John Paul, that’s one area where Sharon Horgan adjusted from the original Belgian series, in an effort to to really believe in this relationship with Grace.

“We cast an attractive man and it was completely deliberate,” Horgan said. “We wanted to move away from the original in that, I love the original…but I never believed that relationship, whereas I wanted the audience to sort of see how Grace could have fallen for him, and I wanted him to have layers and for him not to just be 100 per cent evil, because…you can't play with it.”

“I didn't want the character to be like a dangerously sexy guy, because I always get a bit troubled by that, where the abuse is almost kind of titillating. So we made him...a bit of a figure of fun, we made him a fool and a weak man, and we laughed at him. The sisters think he's, as well as being a dangerous man, a ridiculous man, and that's part of the thing that fuels his anger and the way he sort of begins to operate within his marriage and isolate Grace. But again, it was a fine line, it was something we just had to tread carefully to make him a figure of fun without taking away his danger.”

Grace is certainly the heart of the series and Bad Sisters gets to the point where we want to protect her, just like her sisters.

“We're telling a story about somebody being really bullied, I suspect there will be people watching the show who have experienced that or are experiencing it in several forms, so it might be fantastically helpful for them, or even somebody who's bullying somebody might go, ‘Oh my God, that's a bit familiar, that's a bit uncomfortable,’” Anne-Marie Duff said. “Also, just for people to relish in the nature of the family and what it means to be ferociously protective of the people you love, and at the same time, fantastically infuriated by them.”

“Family, we don't choose that we have them, they're stuck to us, and so we treat them quite brutally at times, because they're never going to leave us… The heart of that, I think people will enjoy.”