‘Bad Sisters’ creator Sharon Horgan on Season 2’s finale: ‘What if it happened again?’
This story contains spoilers about the Season 2 finale of Apple TV+’s“Bad Sisters.”
When Season 1 of “Bad Sisters” ended in 2022, the story of the Garvey sisters seemed to have reached a tidy conclusion. The evil John Paul was dead, killed not by one of his four sisters-in-law — each of whom had a compelling motive to commit murder — but by his seemingly meek wife, Grace, fed up by years of abusive behavior. With help from her friend Roger (Michael Smiley), she made it look like J.P. had died in an accident, with the rest of the sisters — Eva (Sharon Horgan), Becka (Eve Hewson), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Ursula (Eva Birthistle) — facilitating the cover-up.
But Season 2 has slowly unraveled that neat — perhaps too neat — Hollywood ending. Two years after J.P.’s death, Grace has fallen in love with a seemingly kind new man named Ian (Owen McDonnell), but she starts behaving strangely and then dies in a car crash while fleeing home in a state of distress. The grieving sisters try to uncover the truth about what happened to Grace, and increasingly suspect Roger’s pious, overbearing sister Angelica (Fiona Shaw) of wrongdoing — but turn out to be (mostly) wrong about her intentions. Adding to the Garveys’ panic is an idealistic detective named Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), who started to ask questions about J.P.’s death.
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It all comes to a head in the Season 2 finale, appropriately titled “Cliff Hanger.” It turns out that Ian is not the nice guy he appears to be, but a disgraced former cop named Cormac who has a wife and family in the North and has tricked Eva into handing over money that was intended for Grace’s daughter Blánaid (Saise Quinn). In a heated confrontation with the Garvey sisters at Eva’s house, he threatens to tell police about their role in covering up J.P.’s murder when — whack! — Angelica turns up and hits him on the head with Blánaid’s camogie stick. Believing that Ian is dead, the sisters plan to dispose of his body — only to discover that he is alive. In the end, Houlihan helps silence Ian and protect the sisters. In the final scene, the Garveys set Grace’s ashes adrift in the sea and finally seem to put their sister’s trauma behind them.
Series creator Sharon Horgan spoke to The Times about Season 2 and the twist-filled finale. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Season 1 seemed to wrap things up rather neatly. What made you want to go back for more?
I didn’t think I was going to go back for more, but everyone responded to those characters. That’s not always the case and Apple wanted to do more. I thought, if I can think of a story that feels important to tell, then I’ll do it.
People found the ending perfect — it was, kind of, but I was much more interested in the real life of it all. Even though it was heightened, it was always supposed to feel that these were ordinary women who experienced something extraordinary but terrible. In the real world, it isn’t neat and triumphant like that. I wanted to explore the aftermath of something like that and what would really happen to a woman like Grace who had been isolated and full of shame for so many years.
In researching those relationships, and what happens when someone comes out the other side — if they manage to — they don’t necessarily fall into a healthy relationship. They’re so vulnerable, they can be targeted easily.
My original idea was what if it happened again? Would she be believed? What would her sisters’ reaction be? Could she go to them? Then the story started coming into the light. I knew it would be more brutal, but I also felt like I wanted to dig into that. I wanted to really feel the aftermath of what it’s like to have an abuser in your life. I wanted to dig into the institutions that are there to protect us and what happens when they don’t. There was still a lot of stuff I was angry about, and I wanted to tell it through these sisters, who people like watching,
Did you do research into domestic abuse and con artists?
I did a lot of work around the “Dirty John“-type relationships, the kind of women who end up in those situations and the psychopaths behind them.
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Ian is a different kind of villain from J.P. He presents as a nice, sensitive guy, but then it turns out he’s this serial abuser and con man. Were you trying to explore another kind of toxic male?
I was more interested in exploring how difficult it is to move on when you’ve been in Grace’s situation and how open and vulnerable women like that are, and [people] who can find their way in through the cracks. I was interested in all of the sisters and where they are two years on, how what happened in Season 1 impacted all of them. For Eva, she finally got to offload to her sisters that terrible thing that had happened to her [getting raped by J.P.] and had arrested her life. She’s now starting over. There was a lot of me in there — like, let’s try and fix my life. Let’s go out and run, let’s stop drinking, let’s sort my hormones, all that. When she suffers bereavement, she’s vulnerable and just wants something to fill that grief hole.
It’s interesting because not only does Grace fall for Ian, the sisters do too — Eva literally.
That’s what happens — whole families are taken in and they feel so much shame around having been duped. These guys are incredibly good at what they do. The idea that he met Grace at her bereavement group — I listened to so many podcasts and read so many articles with stories like that.
Are you a true crime podcast listener?
Audio books, too. I heavily deep dove into true crime — for too long, actually, I’ve cut it out. It was getting to an unhealthy place. I know women are drawn to it. But you don’t want to stay in there for too long. It becomes like an addiction. I was listening to them at night and then waking up in the morning having forgotten to switch it off, and it was onto the next one.
Do you have a theory about why women are so into true crime?
So they know what to expect and can do their best to avoid it. So they’re aware. A lot of the stories I was reading were about narcissistic men and psychopaths, and how they operate. I’m not saying I’m hyper-vigilant now, but I certainly know the signs.
At a screening in New York, you alluded to the appeal of “Bad Sisters” in the present political climate because it’s a story about women refusing to have the bad decisions of men deciding their destiny. How much were you consciously channeling female rage when you were writing this show?
Certainly when I was making Season 1, I was like, “This could be very cathartic, this could help everyone feel angry together.” As I was making it, there was stuff that was really upsetting me. It was what happened with Sarah Everard and the fact that her murder was perpetrated by a cop and her having done all the right things, yet still it happened. I found it so terrifying. There were several [similar] stories about cops who’d been allowed to perpetrate [crimes] and get away with it, and they continued to work because it is so institutionally sexist. This is why I wanted the character of Houlihan to feel like a potential light. I was really angry about all that, and I wanted to use the show to have a group catharsis again, where the baddies get done, and the good people come out on top.
Angelica is interesting because the sisters really misjudge her. Why is that?
Sometimes we’re so angry about what’s going on in the world, we misplace our anger. Angelica was such an amazing character for me because she was really just a decoy baddie. She’s a very flawed person, and she’s a bigot in her own way. But she is a product of her environment and that generation, especially in Northern Ireland at that time. A certain life was expected for you, and woe betide you if you went outside of that. Suddenly she sees this new generation of modern Irish women, and she’s like, “What is that?”
There’s so much that we forgive people for that is generational, all sorts of bigotry. I think she rattled the sisters. She represents everything that they stand against. They’re a very liberal, free group of women. It’s also their grief, their paranoia and the panic that leads them to get it so wrong. But at the same time, Angelica is a wagon. [Irish slang for an ornery woman.]
So how did you decide that Angelica would be the one to (almost) kill Ian? She’s like an honorary bad sister now.
Fiona Shaw always said, “I’m the heroine of the piece.” There were all sorts of routes we were going to take — it was Blánaid, it was one of the sisters. I felt like I’d seen “it was the kid,” and I didn’t want it to be one of the sisters because it didn’t feel as unexpected. I wanted it to be this woman who, against all odds, makes you cheer. I wanted that moment when the camera pans up and you would be like, “F— well done!” And I wanted them to choose to look after her and it felt like the sisterhood expanded at that point. There was some beautiful, f— up solidarity there that I liked. Angelica was like Rambo with the camogie stick. It’s weird, the way that story comes together. Sometimes you have the visuals first. I kept thinking about what new Irish thing I wanted to introduce to the audience. My sisters and I used to play camogie [an Irish sport similar to lacrosse] when we were little, and my sister got her front teeth knocked out. I wanted to see the next generation of young women playing this sport that’s so brutal. I had that idea before I had the idea that it would would [nearly] kill Ian.
There has been some conversation lately about the Irish moment that seems to be happening in pop culture. I wonder if you have thoughts about it?
We don’t have the baggage [of imperialism] and we’re really good storytellers because that’s all we had for so long. We had nothing. We just had the craic and someone to be angry with. There’s an amazing tradition of storytelling and also this great darkness and ability to harness tragedy and make a great song or a story about it. For a small island, we’ve always had enormous talent come out of it and hugely influential impact on culture. The “why now” — that I don’t know. There’s probably some very practical reason for it, like funding, but it’s really lovely.
So are you done telling the story of the Garvey sisters?
I know that when I wrote the ending for this season it felt like the end. I guess an idea could come to mind that feels viable for the world we’ve created, but for now I think we have a finale that gives fans what they wanted and allowed me to say what I needed to say.
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