Bad Sisters

🧠 What It's Really About

The show is a comedy about coercive control and it absolutely earns that balance. That is the trick Horgan pulls off. The black comedy is real. The kitchen-table banter between the Garvey sisters is some of the best written dialogue on television in the last five years. The cruelty of JP is also real. The show never softens it or plays it for laughs. It sits in the room with you and makes you feel exactly how trapped Grace is and why four otherwise ordinary women decide murder is the least bad option on the table.

It is also a show about sisterhood. About what blood actually means. About the way the Garveys close ranks around each other even when they are furious with each other. Irish Catholic guilt runs through it. So does the quiet rage of women who have been told to keep it down for too long.

It is the funniest show I have seen about domestic abuse, which should sound like a contradiction and is not.

If I have one structural niggle, it is that a reverse whodunit has to pay off its big question by the finale, and S1 lands that payoff cleanly. S2 is on harder ground because the mystery has already been answered. The second season leans instead into aftermath, guilt, and what the Claffins left behind. It does not have the engine of the first. It does have Fiona Shaw chewing through scenes like she is being paid by the tooth.

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Visually the show is more muted than you might expect for a comedy. Grey Dublin skies. Wind-battered coastal houses. A lot of scenes shot at kitchen tables in the specific yellow light of an Irish winter afternoon. Music is used sparingly. The needle-drops that do land, land hard. The show trusts its actors and its script, which is the right call when your cast is this good and your script is this tight.

The comedic rhythm is distinctly Horgan. If you know her from Catastrophe or Pulling you will recognise the pace. Overlapping dialogue. Siblings talking over each other in a way that feels completely true to life. A fondness for the one line that cuts through an entire scene.

📈 Reception & Legacy

Season 1 won Best Drama Series at the BAFTAs in 2023 and took home Best Supporting Actress for Duff. It was nominated at the Emmys, Golden Globes, and SAGs. Critics were close to unanimous. Audiences turned up in enough numbers to earn it the Season 2 commission, which for an Apple TV+ prestige show that was not a returnable format is a real achievement. It also did the thing a lot of streaming hits cannot, which is cross over into broader cultural conversation. For a few months in late 2022 everyone I knew with a TV subscription had an opinion on The Prick.

It is fair to say Horgan has used the goodwill well. She has become one of the defining writer-performers of British and Irish television. Bad Sisters will be remembered as one of her peak achievements, alongside Catastrophe.

🏆 Why It Works

Five reasons. The writing is properly good. The cast is deep and nobody phones it in. The premise has a built-in engine that keeps you pressing next. The subject matter is taken seriously even while the comedy sings along around it. And it is Irish in a way that feels specific rather than exported, which is rare for shows pitched at a global streaming audience. Rare.

If you like your prestige TV with a sharp tongue and a big heart, this is for you. I think it sits comfortably alongside Kin as the other Dublin-set show on the site worth your time, though Kin is a full crime epic and Bad Sisters is a domestic thriller with comedy bones. Fans of Mare of Easttown will recognise the ensemble-grief-plus-investigation template. Derry Girls shares the Irish wit, if very little of the tone. And for anyone already deep in Apple TV+ prestige, it is the natural companion to Slow Horses in terms of what that platform has quietly been putting out.

Five sisters. One monster. Zero regrets.

Owen McDonnell

Donal