Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters on Apple TV+ Is a Murderous Delight

There have been a small spate of murder comedies on TV lately, and it’s a delightful micro genre. Mixing a mystery and thriller with humor—and doing it well—is no small feat. But Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters (based on the 2012 Flemish series Clan) manages it with aplomb. And unlike Hulu’s cozy murder show, Only Murders in the Building, Bad Sisters doesn’t have us hunting for the killer so much as hoping whoever it was gets away with it.

This new hourlong Apple TV+ series is set in Dublin, where four charismatic and tightly-knit sisters lament that their fifth sister, Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), has had the life sucked out of her by her miserable husband, John Paul (Claes Bang). Grace is too traumatized to see how John Paul’s manipulations have damaged her, turning her from a loving and vivacious woman to a scared, anxious mess. And it’s affected their daughter as well as her relationship with her sisters.

But each of the Garvey sisters have a bone to pick with John Paul personally, too. Eva (Sharon Horgan), the stand-in matriarch of the family, works with him and puts up with his heinous barbs about her being single and unable to have children. Ursula (Eva Birthistle) has a run-in with him after he trails her and discovers she’s been taking time from her husband and three children to carry on an affair—a fact he uses to both humiliate and blackmail her. Bibi (Sarah Green) is permanently maimed because of an accident he caused, and Becka (Eve Hewson)—often John Paul’s lone defender—has the rug pulled out from her when he goes back on a financial promise just to make her look like a fool.

Bad Sisters opens with John Paul’s funeral, and we are quickly made to assume the sisters (minus Grace) are responsible. But the truth is not quite so cut and dry; the series flips back and forth between the present and six months prior, when the plan was first hatched, using an easy-to-follow film transition to take us between those moments. We don’t know how John Paul died, at least at first, because what becomes clear very early on is that the sisters made more than one attempt on his life, and none of them (as of the first four episodes screened) go according to plan. What begins as an idea that one sister has slowly grows into a group effort, as the women individually come to the end of their ropes with their twisted brother-in-law.

It will be of little surprise from a Horgan project that the series’ women are written incredibly well and portrayed with humor and heart—the excellent cast shines in individual scenes and when they are together. But Claes Bang is also phenomenal as a man you not only want to see murdered, you’d like to do it with your own bare hands. Smug, petulant, creepy, and emotionally abusive, all under the guise of prudishness and “care,” few men on TV will provoke such hatred (although I can think of one). But still, truly, do we want to see him die?

The show’s premiere episode answers that question well and clearly after the first botched attempt: in the wake of the presumed horror of the act, the only thing worse is finding out it didn’t work. And that’s where Bad Sisters goes from being a decent whodunnit to a can’t-stop-watching caper where the humor is augmented with each subsequent episode.