Bad Sisters is back – and Sharon Horgan’s got a whole new series of black comedy to treat us with. Having returned to co-write, produce and star in another season alongside The Perfect Couple’s Eve Hewson, Anne-Marie Duff, Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene, it’ll take a lot to beat an explosive, deliciously female-fronted first season.
The premise is simple, dark and somehow completely hilarious. Season one sees a group of sisters conspire to murder their abusive brother-in-law. It’s a masterclass in depicting the nuances of coercive control, while simultaneously softening the edges of the story with the core characteristics of sisterhood: love and laughter.
How does Sharon do it? We quickly agree that this is her MO: expertly combining truth – even the most awful elements of it – with comedy. After all, it’s what she’s been doing her entire career.
Irish acting legend Fiona Shaw joins the ranks for season two, and Sharon makes no secret of her nerves about asking Fiona onboard, and her fears she had about what the Killing Eve star might think about the show’s “whack-a-doodle” story. But she needn’t have worried – Fiona fully got the memo and is as dry and hilarious as the rest of the Bad Sisters crew.
When I ask what the secret is to Irish women being so funny – the Bad Sisters leading ladies all hail from the Emerald Isle – Sharon is just as humble, singing the praises of her castmates. “They just f**king crack me up constantly,” she says. “So I get to write them funny lines, but Jesus, if they weren't delivering them in exactly the way or better than I hoped, then it wouldn't be what it is.”
The closeness between the sisters – mirrored offscreen with a WhatsApp group chat named “season two bad bitches” which Sharon describes as “bratty” – will be tested this season, when they grapple with the aftermath and ripple effect of abuse.
“I wanted it to have a real reason for existing, and not just like one for the money,” Sharon tells me of the new chapter. The conclusion of season one felt pretty tied up, with too beautiful a bow, almost. The Garvey sisters are in the clear, they’re together, they’re swimming somewhere in the Irish sea at peace – with abuse victim Grace feeling empowered and liberated. While Sharon knew the ending was popular, she didn’t feel it was necessarily true to real life.
“In reality, there is an ongoing trauma from being in an abusive relationship like that,” Sharon explains, adding that Anne Marie Duff’s character Grace in particular would have struggled with shame and guilt from the events of season one. She adds that coming to write season two and focussing on the aftermath of Grace’s abuse and John Paul’s death felt “much more up my street” after the shocking black comedy (which she describes as “caper and fun”) of the sisters continued campaign to kill their brother-in-law in season one.
“I really wanted to get into how those women are let down by the police, and by the support networks around them,” Sharon says, explaining how this opens the sisters up to further abuse. “They are targets for the next bad person who wants to take advantage of a vulnerable soul.”
The sisters will also face a huge amount of grief this season (no spoilers, of course), which Sharon explains that many of us will recognise as an “open wound” which in the case of the Bad Sisters women meant that “you’re ripe to be taken for a ride”.
While writing this season, she took a deep dive into the world of abuse (“I got way too heavily into all the podcasts, you know. I mean, obviously the sort of Dirty John type ones”) to do justice to the many survivors who reached out to her after the first season of Bad Sisters aired in 2022.
“The response from the first season was like a gut punch,” she says. “I was so relieved that the women who contacted me felt represented, but it was so awful to [hear from] so many women who've been through it, or somebody who watched their sister in that relationship and not even know that that's what it was. They just knew that something was wrong. So I really, really hope that Bad Sisters continues to platform those stories.”
The other stories that Sharon has chosen to tell throughout her career have hit a similar dark, comedic and truthful chord – from sex and singledom in your 30s in her first TV series Pulling and finding your mum tribe in Motherland to the difficulties of relationships and parenthood in hit show Catastrophe, which she co-wrote with co-star Rob Delaney.
When it came to the latter, it was all about showing the ugliness in marriage and parenthood, but seeing love prevail. “I think we put so much pressure on ourselves to get it right, or to have the perfect relationship,” she says. “To me, there was something really romantic about seeing two people really struggle and fight and be awful to each other and to go through all sorts of sh*t, like the death of parents, dementia, alcoholism and all the difficulties that there can be in bringing a child into the world. And still staying in love – to me, it’s about how they fought to stay in love.”
She adds that it was also about injecting some reality into romantic stories, that pretty much no relationship is perfect – whatever you might see on the surface. “Before my divorce I would look at people's relationships – even when they're right in front of me, not just on Instagram or whatever, and I'd be like, 'why haven't I got that?' But really, you're only being shown one side, and it's not fair.
“There are so few relationships that are perfect, and there are so few parents that are getting it right and it just felt way funnier to write about that stuff. It's like what you were saying about Bad Sisters,” she tells me. “The thing that carries it is truth and comedy. And it was the same for Catastrophe as well.”
I tell her that I watched Catastrophe for the first time with my boyfriend, and that we both identified Sharon (Horgan) and Rob (Delaney)’s good and bad attributes in each other. “It’s funny you say that, because that was the thing that I loved – that couples watched it together… Catastrophe, for all its horrors, is something I think couples can really enjoy together,” Sharon says. Unlike, she adds, her 2016 TV series Divorce – starring Sarah Jessica Parker in her first TV role since Sex and the City. Apparently couples don’t necessarily want to watch the breakdown of a marriage together, as much as they want to watch people making the same relationship mistakes that they make. While watching Catastrophe may be couples therapy for some of us, Sharon described writing it – and her other shows – as her own form of therapy.
As well as depicting dating, romance, parenthood and breakups on screen, Sharon also tackled motherhood and the importance of finding the right community and support network in sitcom Motherland. She describes how hard she found navigating the school gates and her desperation to find the “crew” who would get what she was going through.
“It's a really difficult time, especially when you're trying to juggle work and be all things to everyone,” she says. “And you do need your crew. As soon as you find them, you're like, ‘oh, this is it’. It’s everything.”
Sharon got her break back in the mid Noughties with Pulling, a series loosely based on her own experiences being single in her early 30s and living in East London. A show focussed on young women’s lives was a rarity back then. “There were very, very few of us,” she says of female TV comedy writers. “It was all men who wrote the comedy back then. When we were making Pulling, there was nothing else like it at the time. And it probably would have taken another five years for something similar to come along.”
It felt to her like Pulling filled a quota of sorts for TV shows about women’s lives: “It was just like, oh, this is our female show, and that’s covered.” So when it was successful, she had mixed feelings. “I had a bit of survivor's guilt in a way, because I did feel that I was lucky to get in there at that time, to be in the right place at the right time – but a lot of people weren't. A lot of women weren't. So I've always felt grateful, but kind of guilty for having had that opportunity.”
She went on to advocate for herself and other women in the male-dominated world of TV and comedy by starting her own production company, Merman. Sharon describes becoming tired of writing scripts and handing them over to others and saying to herself “why am I doing that?”
For her, “having a company that is predominantly female and supports young female writers and filmmakers” was a big part of advocating for herself and others, stressing the importance of “being very, very present, trying not to take no for an answer… Not being afraid to be strong, not being afraid to be pushy when I need to be pushy, and having faith in myself and my abilities."
“I've been doing it a while now,” she says. “It took a while to gain the kind of confidence that you need, you know… white man confidence. I feel comfortable in rooms now, and it's weird that it's taken me to 54 [years old] to get to that. But you know, it takes a long time to turn around such a huge machine from being so male-driven and male-focussed to now being, well, certainly more of a level playing field.”
She certainly empowers victims of abuse with her work on Bad Sisters, as well as championing female voices in the entertainment industry that might otherwise go unheard. But when I ask Sharon what empowers her personally, she has a quick and simple answer.
“Oh, information,” she says. “I used to fill my head so full of TV and writing my own things that I wasn't looking around at the world, and in the last few years, I found that kind of limiting. How do you fill your tank back up, you know? It's important to feel connected with the world and to read and take in information, and it gives me a kind of confidence.
“It's very easy in TV Land to feel like TV is the only thing that matters. I think it's just really important to not do that – to be connected with the world and to see other points of view.”
Bad Sisters will premiere on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, followed by one episode weekly every Wednesday.
