'Bad Sisters' Remains Delightfully Naughty in Season 2

In the ensuing years since Bad Sisters’ first season finale, word of mouth has helped buoy the AppleTV+ dramedy to one of TV’s most talked-about shows. I have never recommended the series to anyone who didn’t love it. As the saying goes, it’s good to be bad, and Bad Sisters’ particular brand of dark comedy was a delight. But there was such a finality to the first season. Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) killed her awful husband, JP (Claes Bang), and her sisters, who had been unsuccessful in killing him all season long, helped her cover up her crime. 

After a two-year absence, the Garvey sisters are back. When a second season was announced a month after the first one ended, the obvious question was how series creator Sharon Horgan, who stars as Eva Garvey, would pull it off. It’s not like the Garvey sisters could conspire again to commit another crime. Or could they?

The action picks up two years later when Grace is in bed with her kind and loving fiance, Ian (Owen McDonnell). The only problem is that sometimes she tries to strangle him in her sleep, and also, he doesn’t seem to know much about her past. But every relationship has its problems. Her daughter Blainaid (Saise Quinn) is a typical teen who loves and hates her mom all at the same time, but Quinn takes eye-rolling to new heights. Ursula’s (Eva Birthistle) marriage is over, and her job at the hospital is on rocky ground. Bibi (Sarah Greene) and her wife are considering having another baby. No longer with Matt (Daryl McCormack, who returns this season), Becka (Eve Hewson) has a new boyfriend and continues to have the unique ability to muck up her life. As for Eva, she is facing turning 50 and the onset of menopause.  

The sisters are keen to celebrate Grace’s newfound peace and happiness, except maybe for Eva, who is happy for her sister but a little wary. “I don’t know why she needs to get married again,” she tells Becka. But even though the pilot episode is called “Good Sisters,” these sisters are bad, and it’s not long before tragedy strikes. 

Surprisingly, this season’s villain comes in the form of Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve), who joins the cast as Roger’s (Michael Smiley) pious sister, Angelica. Angelica’s spidey senses tingle that the siblings are not as sweet and innocent as they seem. Roger, for one, can’t seem to forget the role he played in JP’s death. “I carry it with me every day,” he tells Grace. Wracked with guilt, Roger considers confessing everything to the police. 

In a hilarious sequence, Angelica starts by knocking Eva out of the way so she can catch Grace’s bouquet at the wedding. But then Angelia's actions become a little more sinister. We’ve all known someone like Angelica, a socially awkward person desperate for friendship and bound to say the absolute wrong thing at the wrong time. “You’re not helping me. You’re suffocating me. I can’t breathe. It’s too much,” Grace tells her. Meanwhile, Roger is looking for love in all the wrong places and asks each of the Garvey girls out in painfully awkward ways.

The other issue for the Garvey sisters is the new homeowners have found JP’s father, who JP killed in season one, buried in a suitcase at the bottom of a swamp. That leads DI Fergal Lofthus (Barry Ward, who returns for a second season) and his new young and enthusiastic partner Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham) back in the Garvey sisters’ orbit, asking all sorts of questions they don’t want to answer. 

Fergal gets more of a personal life as he fights for custody of his children amidst a contentious divorce. Graham is a lot of fun as the young, confident cop who doesn’t know nearly as much as she thinks she does.  

Unfortunately, the second season lacks the dramatic thrust of the first, as the conceit of the premise isn’t as clever. It was, simply put, more fun to watch a failed attempt on JP’s life every week. The second outing struggles to find a rhythm. As fun as it is to watch Shaw play Angelica’s righteous indignation to perfection (she even looks down on the amount of sugar Becka takes in her tea), she’s not enough to carry the entire season. Nor is Ian, who might not be the knight in shining armor he appeared to be in the season’s opening moments. The fun comes from just watching the Garvey sisters do their thing, even if their thing this time around isn’t as compelling. 

Bad Sisters Season 2's first two episodes are streaming on Apple TV+. The series continues with weekly episodes every Wednesday, with the finale streaming on Christmas Day, December 25, 2024.