‘Bad Sisters’ Creator Sharon Horgan Talks That “Brutal” Season 2 Death And Thoughts About A Season 3
SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for all six episodes of Bad Sisters that are available to stream on Apple TV+ thus far.
Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters has two episodes left to go in its second season, which involves several new wild card characters in a murder mystery different from that of Season 1.
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Two years after the first season of the dark comedy, Grace Williams (Anne-Marie Duff) (née Grace Garvey and soon-to-be Reilly) has found a new love, but traces of her dead husband John Paul (Claes Bang), who the other four Garvey sisters call “The Prick,” still threaten to overturn the peace that the five siblings, particularly Grace, have found since his death, which drove the plot of the first season.
Creator Sharon Horgan, who stars as eldest Garvey sister Eva, spoke in the below interview with Deadline about shaping Season 2, the tragic death early on in the season and how she wanted to differentiate the second installment from the first. Her thoughts on a third season can also be found below.
DEADLINE: What, if anything, did you learn from season one and take and employ in season two?
SHARON HORGAN: Well, just everything about it, I suppose, just the whole thing, because I hadn’t worked in that space before at all. I’d come from sitcom world, which is half hour and two laughs on every page. I think my stuff always had a drama slant to it. It’s always interested in exploring darker or trickier material, for sure, but it taught me everything: how you sustain story over hour-long episodes and how you parse out the thrills and the spills, writing for quite a large ensemble cast, writing for five female leads and the long haul. I was used to these really short filming periods. When we would make a sitcom in the UK, it’s like seven weeks, and then you’re done. It’s that stamina that you need to have.
DEADLINE: How did approach the dynamic between the Garvey sisters and how they each have their new obstacles this season?
HORGAN: Well, I guess just giving the story a two year break. Like taking Eva, for example, we really put her through the ringer in Season 1, but at the end, she gets to tell her family a secret that’s been ruining her life for the last 10 years, and it was so painful, but I figured there would be some weight lifted and some sort of resetting of herself and her life.
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I kind of used everything that Season 1 gave me, Ursula (Eva Birthistle) and her ennui and needing something else, how Bibi (Sarah Greene) with Nora (Yasmine Akram) — their family was backgrounded while she tried to work things out for Grace — and Becka (Eve Hewson) meeting someone who became so important to her so quickly. And what do you do when that’s gone? Who replaces that? And Grace meeting someone who she thinks is the love of her life, but really she’s somebody who was so isolated for so many years and [was] so damaged and so vulnerable that she’s just sort of open to being taken advantage of, and so full of shame that she can’t really be open with her sisters. She’s so used to holding it all in, all of these things just fed into all the new dynamics and then, once you have all of those, you run with it. But then the story is impacting on every single thing you do, every choice that the sisters have made, the choices that The Prick made in the first season, end up impacting on them in one way or another.
And then, of course, we had the really open wound of Grace’s death. That changes everything, and it changes how you approach things. Eva would never have let her heart be open to what happened with Ian if she hadn’t been in if she hadn’t been so wounded. She needs to feel something that isn’t just pain. And so I think it’s the same for all of them. The impact of that, and the pain of that, but then also there’s this whole thing of, I just suffered a bereavement myself right about the time that we were making the show. It seemed to me that, with my brothers and sisters, we didn’t stop trying to make each other laugh. There’s a crack of light in all of those dark moments. That was something that I knew would help propel it so it wasn’t a grief fest, which I didn’t want it to be. I wanted it to be a sort of a real look at how, how bad things can get when you’ve, been in a situation like that, when you’ve been isolated like that, and what happens when another trauma comes along?
DEADLINE: Did you ever think about having Claes [Bang] appear in flashbacks this season?
HORGAN: No. I mean [he’s] such a powerful character, and I just didn’t see how you could do it and just sort of nod to it. What I really wanted was the ghost of him and his deeds and his terrible choices to impact on them from the start. When you see Grace in bed with Ian, and her nightmare wakes her up. You know just from that point that it’s not gone away. That doesn’t happen. And then the father’s body being dredged up, so he’s there, like his deeds are there.
DEADLINE: Fiona Shaw and Thaddea Graham both add so much comedic relief, but also seriousness. Did you have them specifically in mind for these characters? How did their casting come about?
HORGAN: Fiona Shaw, absolutely was in our minds from very, very early on. And Thaddea, I had never seen her before, and it was an absolute revelation to me. But we have a great casting director, Nina Gold, and she suggested her, and Thaddea wasn’t how I visualized Houlihan at all, and certainly didn’t even think of her being Northern Irish or any of that, but she informed the character so much. You have to cast a lot earlier than you would want to, in a way, because scripts aren’t finished, or even started in a lot of cases, but both of them, I have to say, impacted on how I approached those characters and loads of great choices that I wouldn’t have thought of or wouldn’t have made it had they not been both so singular in how they play the character, and also their intelligence. Fiona had so many great thoughts about what it means to be a woman of that age and also through her religiousness, even being from the North of Ireland, and the limits that we place on, or were placed on, women from that generation, and how frustrating and sort of surreal it must have been seeing this younger generation have so much more freedom. With Thaddea, everything about her physicality, how she wears clothes, it just changed and informed the character and how I wrote her.
DEADLINE: With Grace’s death, did you ever consider it being a different sister? How does that raise the stakes?
SHARON: Never thought about [it]being a different sister at all. I thought about other approaches to the story for sure. I was nervous about it because, sometimes audiences get angry if you do something like that. Sometimes it might seem like it’s for the shock of it or the sake of it. And really it wasn’t. My worry was that we would be able to continue the tone of Bad Sisters, if we had such an important beloved character die, because, how do you get back on the horse? How do you restart the caper? That tone was such an important part of the first season, so that took a bit of figuring out. The grief wave is such a movable thing. I knew, as long as it impacted on the sisters in various ways throughout the season, it didn’t have to be there all the time, because it isn’t. It’s the weirdest thing. It’s a horrible thing, you feel guilty when you realize you’re not thinking about the person you’ve lost, but I wanted it to feel as real and truthful as possible.
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Once, I figured out what the storyline could be, I thought, well, I have to go all out. You kind of have to show how brutal it can be and how bad things could get. And it really upset me, the thought of her not being able to reach out to her sisters, and that being the cause of her death in some way. If she’d just f*cking called them, if she’d just told them what she was scared of, but she just couldn’t, she’s not conditioned. She’s so full of shame and for it to happen, not necessarily again, but for her to have brought that into her daughter’s life and her sisters’ life again, and then when she does call, it’s too late. It felt like a difficult choice, but I hope as people continue with the series, they’ll see why it was important.
DEADLINE: Have you thought about a Season 3 at all?
HORGAN: Well, you know, I love those girls so much, and I actually enjoyed this season, making it, with all the hardships and terrible times. It was such an amazing cast, and Fiona and Owen and Barry and Thaddea, they all fit in so beautifully. My brain obviously had such a great time, but I feel like the ending is the ending.
As sad as it is to say goodbye, the thing with this second season was that it had to be, the events of Season 2 had to be fully impacted by what happened in Season 1. These were always supposed to be ordinary women who an extraordinary thing happened to and how they dealt with it. And I didn’t ever want it to be a thing where just crazy shit kind of happens to them. It’s the actions of “The Prick” and his terrible legacy and how they deal with it and bad choices they make, but that can’t keep happening because otherwise, it’s Nancy Drew. It’s something else entirely.
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