On the surface, Bad Sisters had no real reason to extend beyond a limited series. Even though the Season 1 finale didn’t wrap everything up in a tidy bow, it felt like a natural endpoint for the Garvey sisters. Perhaps most concerningly, the promise of a second season risks taking away the best part of Season 1: watching the family band together and get away with murder.
Despite the show’s title, it was evident the sisters weren’t in fact bad, but deeply protective of one another, and that JP’s death was not only inevitable, but deserved. The fact that they managed to get away with it was the icing on a very luscious cake. But making another season means stripping back the best element of Bad Sisters.
That’s a major challenge, but creator Sharon Horgan proves an extremely capable pair of hands. Horgan, who is also behind shows like Catastrophe and Pulling, is one of the funniest and most exciting talents in television. And though this Season 2, which premiered Nov. 13 on Apple TV+, isn’t as funny as its predecessor, it still has plenty of sinister wit. Things are even darker this time around, including a shocking moment in an early episode that has major repercussions for the rest of the series. Thankfully, another season of the Garvey sisters trying to avoid suspicion still packs plenty of entertainment, and the weekly waits for new episodes promise to be agonizing.
Season 2 takes place two years after JP’s murder, and there are major new developments. Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) seems to be in much better spirits thanks to her new beau Ian (Owen McDonnell); Bibi (Sarah Greene) is planning to have a baby with her wife Nora (Yasmine Akram); Becka (Eve Hewson) is in a new relationship of her own; and Eve (Horgan) and Ursula (Eva Birthistle) are trying to get their lives back on track.
The early promise of their collective futures is thrown into disarray upon the discovery of JP’s father’s body, which reignites suspicions over Grace and the Garvey sisters. Things get chaotic fast as suspicions bubble up and the Garveys once again concoct a bevy of complex schemes to avoid the truth coming to light. That anxiety begets bad decisions and various degrees of successful (or unsuccessful) crisis management—that’s not great for the Garvey’s, but it does make for tremendously watchable television.
It can be daunting to jump into a new show in its second season, but Bad Sisters is remarkably accessible for new viewers in Season 2—you could acclimate yourself pretty quickly. Admittedly, this accessibility is both a feature and a flaw. Part of the reason the new episodes are so manageable is that Season 2 often feels like a rehashing of the first. There are new characters and plenty of fresh plot machinations, but we’re once again faced with a group of wonderful women trying to navigate the aftermath of a murder. That doesn’t make things less entertaining, but it’s a bit frustrating that despite some promise of breaking form, Season 2 feels largely familiar.
Still, the reason Season 1 worked so well is the Garvey sisters, and they’re every bit as magnetic this time around. They’re joined by a group of dynamite new characters. There’s the plucky, overly determined cop Officer Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), who makes a great pairing with the returning inspector Loftus (Barry Ward) who’d rather not work very hard. Ian is a delightful and charming addition with some interesting tendencies of his own that unfold deliciously throughout the season.
But the most enticing newbie is Angelica (Fiona Shaw), a religious zealot and the sister of Roger (Michael Smiley), who played a key role in JP‘s demise. Shaw is enormously compelling in this villainous turn, employing her unwavering Catholic beliefs with a chilling gentleness to wreak havoc on the sisters’ sanity. She may be the key to unraveling all the secrets so carefully built up over the years—but the best way to get the answer to that is to watch this thrilling season of Bad Sisters yourself.
