(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
The first thing Sharon Horgan does when I bring up the heartbreak I felt watching the new season of Bad Sisters is to apologize. No, one of my favorite shows of 2022 hasn’t gone down the toilet in terms of quality in Season 2, but the end of the second new episode, now available on Apple TV+, delivers a gut punch by killing off a major character.
After spending all of the first season waiting and cheering to see how John Paul Williams, aka The Prick (Claes Bang), would bite the bullet, it is the opposite feeling watching the recently remarried Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) flip her vehicle and not make it out alive. Sure, it didn’t look like anyone could survive the impact of the crash, and yet part of me wondered whether there was a chance she would pull through. Cut to the flashing blue lights arriving at Eva Garvey’s (Horgan) home with Grace’s daughter Blánaid (Saise Quill) in the backseat of the squad car. As soon as the police officer utters the words, “I’m so sorry,” and Blánaid’s crumpled, teary gaze meets her aunt’s face, the raw anguish confirms there will be no miracle.
The Daily Beast Obsessed recently sat down with Horgan, Eva Birthistle, who plays middle sister Ursula, and Grace herself, Anne-Marie Duff, to discuss this unexpected exit, the ripple effect caused by JP’s death, the growing list of secrets and moments of sisterly joy before this devastating twist.
One concern I had about Bad Sisters coming back is that it would follow the same diminishing returns footsteps of faves like Big Little Lies and Killing Eve, which couldn’t repeat the creative highs of their debut outings. Thankfully, Horgan isn’t echoing those disappointments. Season 2 pushes the story forward while maintaining the mix of humor and serious subject matter that makes it so appealing. “We dealt with a lot of really dark stuff in Season 1. It’s just because it had this sort of caper driving it—trying to kill this guy, failing—it didn’t seem quite so dark,” Horgan says. “But Jesus, we dealt with all sorts—really brutal moments.”
Whereas the JP murder plot was adapted from the Flemish limited series Clan, the sophomore outing is an entirely original storyline from co-creator Horgan. But before you fire off angry missives, killing Grace isn’t a decision Horgan took lightly. “I was nervous about it, and I went back and forth; she was dead, and then I was like, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,” Horgan says. “Then it was honestly the only way I could see us moving forward with the story, where the sisters felt like they had a purpose, where the show felt different, where it felt like Bad Sisters in its DNA, but it was doing something entirely different.”
Set two years after JP’s death, the Garveys have seemingly got on with their lives. Grace is getting remarried to Ian Reilly (Owen McDonnell), a man who gets on with her sisters; Ursula (Birthistle) is divorced and dating; Eva is working her way through the challenges of middle age with a menopause coach; Bibi (Sarah Green) is talking about expanding her family; and Becka (Eve Hewson) is in a new relationship after things with insurance agent Matt Claflin (Daryl McCormack) didn’t work out.
Horgan broke the bad news to Duff in advance. “I did know before the scripts arrived, but I didn’t know the minutiae,” Duff says. It was tough for the rest of the cast, even though the overall storyline put distance between the characters. “In Season 1, a lot of Grace’s storyline was away from the rest of the sisters, so there was this natural thing that happened where we felt slightly removed from Anne-Marie because we didn’t see her as much on set,” Birthistle says. “But the reality was that we were talking about Grace all the time; it felt like her presence was always there.”
Being physically gone will not change Grace as a driving force and motivation as the Garveys deal with grief and untangling their sister’s secrets. “You remove a sister from the storyline, and the loss of that feels really big,” adds Birthistle.
Luckily, a champagne-soaked day out at the races for Grace’s hen do (aka bachelorette party) followed by the intimate wedding hosted by Eva gave the actors a joyous start to the season before it all went to hell again. “The wedding was amazing because it’s all the cast, and that doesn’t happen very often. It’s a good chance to catch up, have a laugh and a dance,” says Birthistle. “The races were the same, just to get all dressed up and be in celebratory mode, as opposed to sad and depressing mode.”
For Duff, it offered a chance to make memories with her on-screen siblings reminiscent of the happy occasion it depicts: “I remember I was dancing with Bibi [Greene], and we were really dancing, and I thought—because we never get to have those moments as characters—it was lovely.”
Not every dance partner shares this lust for life as Grace goes from giddy to trying to contain ex-neighbor Roger’s (Michael Smiley) guilt during a slower number. Roger helped Grace cover up how JP died by staging a freak quadbike accident, but Roger is starting to come apart at the seams. Secrets aren’t the only thing being uncovered; the dismembered corpse of JP’s father, George (“also a Prick”), adds fuel to this precarious situation. “When the body’s found in the pond, which is another JP move, the ghost of him has come back to f--- everything up, which kicks off a chain of events,” says Horgan. “That starts up Roger’s paranoia, gets the police snooping around, gets Grace lying [and making] terrible, terrible choices.”
Grace is trying to embrace life before JP’s past crimes rear their ugly head. “You do feel like he’s still controlling her from beyond the grave. That’s the sadness of it, isn’t it?” says Duff. “She appears to be in such a beautifully joyful place at the beginning of Season 2, but he’ll [JP] never leave her. It’s very Freudian; the return of the repressed.”
Whereas Bang’s performance made it easy to loathe the Prick, Horgan has wisely made this season’s newcomers more ambiguous in motivations—particularly where Grace is involved. The formidable Fiona Shaw plays Roger’s busybody sister Angelica, who Grace got close to before finding Angelica “suffocating.” Grace doesn’t use this insult, but the on-screen caption refers to Angelica as a “wagon,” and the other Garvey sisters opt for this moniker. Horgan happily offers a definition for those unfamiliar with the Irish slang: “It’s only ever used for females, I’m afraid. It’s used in different ways, but it’s usually a stronger word than b---h. It’s a lesser word than the ‘C word.’ It’s just a bad woman, you know?”
Is this a clue about Angelica’s motives and role in Grace’s frantic state when she flipped her car? Shame is a recurring theme, and Grace’s silence around her family makes her vulnerable to someone like Angelica, who offers guidance and a hearty dose of judgment. “When she [Angelica] finds out her secret, like she says, she’s a Christian woman—she’s in the guilt industry,” says Horgan. “She’s a watcher. You see, from the moment she’s at the wedding, she’s watching Roger and Grace. She sees those secrets.”
Scrubbing the floor clean and putting a bloody shirt into the laundry are things the Garveys will do to protect each other. What is clear from the jump is that Bad Sisters isn’t a fairy tale with a happily-ever-after, which is why Horgan made the difficult narrative decision: “I felt as awful as it was [Grace’s death], Season 1 ends on a really high note, and she’s [Grace] triumphantly jumping into the water. Well, for me, that’s a beautiful ending, but it’s not life.”
