Bad Sisters review: A stellar cast, brilliant writer and powerful story — season two should sing, but it doesn't
Bad Sisters: 'It should sing. It doesn't.'
My guess is that (Apple TV+) is made for Americans.
There’s too much coastline and diddly-aye music to impress an Irish viewer. We can get that on the way to work.
And the urban scenes, supposed to be set in one town, are a hodgepodge of locations in Dublin, Belfast and London. So this is Ireland, but not as we know it.
The Yanks won’t spot the difference. They might enjoy the hen-party scene in Leopardstown race-course when the five Garvey sisters go to wish Grace better luck, second time round. (She killed her first husband JP in season one, so there is room for improvement.) But I can’t see many people buying into season two.
Pitched as a dark comedy, it’s neither dark nor funny enough. One minute it’s a crime thriller, where the five complicit sisters are trying to hide their part in JP’s death from an oafish detective.
Then it’s a comedy caper. Fiona Shaw plays Angelica, a cartoonish relic of Catholic Ireland complete with holy pictures and penitential chains around the thighs.
She’s an enjoyable character because you can’t mess with her as she starts to figure out what the sisters did in season one. But you’re basically talking about an evil version of Mrs. Doyle in Father Ted. These two sides of the show don’t blend at all.
We spend way too much time with Detective Fergal Loftus.
An eejit cop on the trail of the five sisters, he is a razor-thin character put in there so his new female assistant Una Hoolihan can make him look like a fool.
She is the star of some running gags that barely break into a jog. We’re supposed to giggle at her clumsiness and the mother who still buys her clothes. I didn’t.
The only bit of this show that worked for me is Anne-Marie Duff’s character Grace and her daughter Bláthnaid.
We don’t judge Grace for killing JP in season one because he was an all-round monster. Duff is brilliant at showing the trauma she still carries after life with a serial abuser.
Saise Quinn is convincing as Bláthnaid, a teenage girl who lost her Dad and can’t figure out why her mother isn’t more upset.
There is proper drama in this corner of Bad Sisters, with a twist I didn’t see coming in episode two.
This is one of the best casts assembled for an Irish TV show.
The story is powerful, Sharon Horgan is a brilliant comedy-drama writer. It should sing. But it doesn’t.
