TV review: Luminous cast, inviting story, and shot in Ireland — why does Bad Sisters fall flat?
Anne-Marie Duff, Saise Quinn, Sharon Horgan, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Eve Hewson in Bad Sisters, on Apple TV+. Picture: PA Photo/AppleTV+
(Apple TV+) has a lot going for it.
Sharon Horgan co-wrote and stars in it. That’s enough for those of us who would happily watch all over again.
It has a luminous cast that includes Anne-Marie Duff, Sarah Greene, Eve Hewson, Eva Birthistle and Brian Gleeson.
The story is inviting — Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) has a gobshite of a controlling partner so her sisters decide to do him in.
The gobshite of a controlling partner, John Paul, is a proper nasty piece of work, his death could definitely have happened to a nicer guy.
As an extra bonus, the show is mainly shot in Ireland, so we get to play spot the landmark.
So why does it fall so flat?
I blame Brian Gleeson. Or at least his character, Tom Claffin, who owns a small insurance business that he inherited from his father. For reasons we will never understand, that business will go bankrupt if they have to pay out on the sizeable policy covering John Paul’s life. I don’t know much about the insurance business, but I do know that small family outfits don’t carry the can when there is a payout.
That was sloppy and annoying. Even more annoying, Claffin turns up at the afters of the funeral to investigate John Paul’s demise. The sisters answer his abrupt questions rather than booting him out the door.
It’s hard to take any of this seriously. My wife called it silly, and she’s right.
The tone of is all over the place. John Paul is a genuinely sinister piece of work, controlling Grace’s contact with her sisters and taking an over-keen interest in his daughter’s eating habits. He’s the dark in this so-called dark comedy. But the rest of it is light-hearted farce, including the early scene where Grace is trying to hide John-Paul’s post-mortem erection at the removal. It’s put in there for a cheap laugh and Sharon Horgan isn’t usually about cheap laughs.
Her best jokes aren’t one-off gags, they’re character-based and funny in context. Watch 10 minutes of her work in Motherland, where the laughs come easy because the world makes sense and you don’t have insurance brokers gate-crashing funerals.
She’s also under-used as an actor in . Horgan is at her best on the front foot, whether she’s angry, sad or plain entertained. Her character here, Eva, feels a bit insipid in comparison.
Maybe it’s because she didn’t write it by herself. (There are nine writer credits, including Paul Howard.) It could be because the story is an adaptation of a Flemish series called Clan.
But it didn’t work for me. The actors, Horgan included, make the most of what they’re given. There are some nice shots of the coastline around Dublin. But couldn’t make up its mind if it was thriller, comedy or rom-com, so it fell between the cracks. And that’s a shame. Because it should have been good.
