Garvey sisters falter after Season 1’s fabulous, murderous mayhem

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This article was published 16/11/2024 (673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The announcement of another season of a much-adored show can go either way.

More Slow Horses? Yes, please.

But a second go-round of Bad Sisters? That news made me nervous.

The 2022 run of this Irish series offered 10 episodes of darkly murderous, recklessly funny, near-perfect television. Tonally daring and held together by tight work from a terrific ensemble cast, the show tracked the hapless attempts of the Garvey girls (Sharon Horgan, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Eve Hewson) to kill the abusive husband (Claes Bang) of their sister Grace (Anne-Marie Duff).

This new season (on Apple TV+, with episodes dropping on Wednesdays) has a kind of residual charm. I still want to be sitting at the kitchen table with the Garvey sisters, drinking and bantering and bitching. But despite a new death — and some old ones resurfaced — Bad Sisters 2 feels fatally unnecessary.

Sophomore seasons can be tough to pull off. They’re especially tricky with murder mysteries, which have generally spent the first season working toward a dramatic, conclusive Big Reveal. Revisiting a wrapped-up murder case is working against the genre’s structure, which certainly has subversive possibilities but too often ends up feeling repetitive and perfunctory.

The old network-TV model for mysteries was to keep things self-contained. Midsomer Murders, for example, has basically been starting every episode fresh for 25 seasons. All the characters politely ignore the fact their little patch of picturesque English countryside has an absolutely astronomical murder rate, which allows the series to stay cosy.

Prestige TV crime dramas can’t do that, however. With their overarching, interconnected narratives and their commitment to exploring larger, deeper, darker truths, their storylines must move ahead.

True Detective has gotten around this issue by using the anthology format. After the buzzy success of its debut series in 2014, each new season has introduced new detectives and new locations. Though they remain loosely connected by recurring themes and symbols, these subsequent installments aren’t really sequels: They’re a very True Detective-y demonstration that “time is a flat circle.”

For shows that choose to go forward, the results are mixed. Broadchurch, which investigated the death of a young boy in a small Dorset town, followed up its first season with an uneven but ambitious second season. Clearly and deliberately grappling with the knock-on effects of violent death, Broadchurch 2 proved that catching the killer is not the final chapter, that grief and loss linger in families and communities long after the mystery is solved.

Season 2 of Big Little Lies, on the other hand, seemed to fall off one of its own gorgeous California cliffs. The strong first season was based on Liane Moriarty’s novel. The second season tried to recapture that compelling plotting and emotional intensity but faltered. Even the addition of a magnificently passive-aggressive Meryl Streep couldn’t justify its existence.

Bad Sisters shares a lot with Big Little Lies — stunning coastal views, big glasses of wine, female solidarity against coercive patriarchal control. Unfortunately, it also shares that second season problem.

Season 2, which brings back talented creator, co-writer and star Horgan, returns to some familiar ideas. Bad Sisters’ first season made the fundamentally optimistic observation that ordinary people don’t take to murder easily. (I mean, thank goodness.) The second season, awash in secrets and guilt, suggests they find murder hard to live with afterwards.

This round also adds some new elements, including the always wonderful Fiona Shaw. As a church lady who battens onto other people’s misery, she is pious and poisonous and hilarious all at once, managing to out-Streep Streep.

Still, in taking what started as a limited series and stretching it into a second season, the show’s tricky tonal balance of black humour and bleak trauma feels off, the plotting slumps, and the characterizations sometimes feel strained.

Sisterhood is still powerful in Season 2, but even the Garveys can’t keep this new narrative together.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca