Bad form
As Bad Sisters returns to Apple TV+, Faye Dorn, head of drama at producer Merman, speaks to DQ about the challenge of following up the acclaimed first season of the show and why continuity was key on and off screen.
When Bad Sisters debuted in 2022, it became an award-winning sensation featuring one of most horrible villains in television’s recent history and an ending that wrapped up the story in particularly satisfying fashion.
Introducing the tight-knit Garvey sisters, the darkly comedic drama explored the fallout from the sudden death of Grace’s abusive husband JP – nicknamed ‘The Prick’ – as his life insurers launch an investigation to prove malicious intent, setting their sights on the sisters, all of whom had good reason to kill him.
The Apple TV+ series subsequently picked up a Peabody award, the Bafta TV prizes for best drama and best supporting actress for Anne-Marie Duff, and the Irish Film & Television Awards for best drama and best leading actress for Sharon Horgan, as well as a clutch of Emmy nominations.
So perhaps it was no surprise when Apple inevitably ordered a second season. Now two years later, off screen and on, Bad Sisters is back with eight new episodes that continue to follow siblings Eva (Horgan), Grace (Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson).
“That second-album syndrome definitely was felt,” executive producer Faye Dorn tells DQ about the challenge of bringing back Bad Sisters in the wake of its success. “But it’s such a special show. We had so much fun making it, so to get the chance to come back and do it again was really a no-brainer.”
In the wake of JP (Claes Bang)’s ‘accidental death,’ the quintet have moved on. But when another body is discovered, they are thrust back into the spotlight and forced to work out who they can trust amid more secrets and lies.
Fiona Shaw, Owen McDonnell and Thaddea Graham also appear alongside Barry Ward, Michael Smiley, Saise Quinn, Daryl McCormack, Yasmine Akram, Jonjo O’Neill, Peter Claffey, Deirdre Mullins, Lorcan Cranitch, Liz Fitzgibbon and Justine Mitchell.
Bad Sisters’ origins lie in Belgian series Clan, which creator and showrunner Horgan used as the basis for the show. “But during the filming of season one, we talked a lot about how we just had a lovely time and what if there was season two. Sharon had the idea for the story probably towards the end of filming, and then it was such a huge success that the conversation was very quickly, ‘Let’s get the band back together.’”
That meant not only reuniting the starry cast but also partnering with largely the same crew that made season one such a success. Horgan penned S1 with Brett Baer, Dave Finkel, Karen Cogan, Ailbhe Keogan, Daniel Cullen, Perrie Balthazar and Paul Howard, and Cogan, Keogan, Howard and Balthazar returned for the sequel, “so we had that continuity and excitement for season two,” Dorn says. “Then we did a couple of writers rooms and plotted out the eight episodes.”
Discussing S2, Dorn and the creative team – Horgan’s Merman once again produces the series, with S1 director Dearbhla Walsh back behind the camera – recognised that what made the show so popular was the bonds between the Garvey sisters and the lengths to which they would go to protect each other.
“We really did strike gold with those actors because each is individually fantastic, but together they were magnificent,” the exec says. “We knew that as long as we had that group with that love and the same emotional stakes of season one, we were on to something.”
They also recognised, however, that they couldn’t just reheat the original story. “You can’t just have them running around trying to kill another prick,” Dorn notes. So there are new antagonists and problems for them to solve, as well as the sisters facing up to some big life events.
“This means we get to spend more time with the sisters and get to see different sides of them and understand their characters more,” Dorn continues. “I’d say the tone, the fun, the joy and that delicious mix of drama and comedy is absolutely still there. But the dramatic narrative structure is a little bit different. It’s not, ‘We’re going to kill a prick and let’s keep trying to do that.’ It takes a different shape and offers a new story and new challenges, but hopefully as much drama and as many laughs.”
The show’s new structure means there’s less reliance on flashbacks than in S1 – in fact, it opens with a flash forward – but the ramifications of previous events are still affecting the characters two years on.
“At the hands of JP, they’ve all suffered an extreme kind of trauma so, yes, at the end of S1, we see Grace jumping into the sea and celebrating her freedom, but that [trauma] doesn’t go away,” Dorn explains. “We start two years later when it’s not hot on the emotion of S1 and the fallout. We give it a bit of space so that their lives could have moved on somewhat, to varying degrees. But that trauma is not going to go away.
The discovery in episode one of a suitcase with a body inside also comes to symbolise the ghost of JP. “Once that is pulled out and the spotlight is once again put on the sisters, it’s then sparking a new story of what they do to protect themselves and invariably how their actions often get them into more trouble. But we definitely consciously didn’t want them sitting around talking about JP. There needed to be more present danger.”
Filmed across a 26-week shoot that began in September last year and wrapped in March, interiors were shot at Wharf Studios in Barking, East London, before the show went on location to film in and around Dublin. Joining the cast and director Walsh – “the sixth Bad Sister,” Dorn says – were producer Johann Knobel, costume designer Camille Benda and hair and makeup designer Nicola Schuller.
“We had brilliant continuity with those creatives, which is really testament to the show because people, especially directors, they don’t always go back for a second season,” Dorn notes. “It’s always a juggle but there weren’t any major problems.”
With the show’s style and tone so integral to the success of S1, the fact there was so much continuity in S2 was “wonderful” for those involved. “We all take it very seriously and love what we do. When you get all of those people who are absolutely at the top of that game and for them to want to come back for a second season and do it again, it really does elevate everything because we’re all absolutely pulling in the same direction and know how to best support and elevate it,” Dorn says. “You just hit the ground running. You’re not spending that time getting people to understand what it is you’re making.”
Making the series comes down to “enabling Sharon’s vision,” Dorn says of Horgan. “It’s that shorthand with her and being creatively simpatico so that at every level it’s about tone and about making sure that the director – we also had Stacey Gregg and James Griffiths directing – knows they can deliver that and they have the tools to deliver that heart, emotion, comedy and visual style.”
That Bad Sisters S2 wasn’t shot in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic like S1 also aided production. Last time out, the cast and crew spent 10 days filming in Northern Ireland to avoid having to spend time in quarantine before moving into the Republic of Ireland – part of the EU – and on to Dublin.
“We didn’t do that this season, which helped because we could just be more efficient with our locations and put those closer together so that we were travelling less,” Dorn says. “We did really well on season one and it was just coming back to season two with bigger ambition and trying to be bigger and better with the visuals and across the board.”
However, the production did have to contend with two particularly bad actors on set, namely Storm Agnes and Storm Kathleen, which happened to interrupt filming two major set pieces. Another challenge came with several scenes filmed at sea – highlighted in the trailer where both Becka and Ursula can be seen on a large yacht.
Shot in Weymouth, on England’s south coast, which doubled for the Irish Sea, the sequence demonstrates one of the perks of making a series that is backed by tech giant Apple, as even when it was discussed early on in the writers room, the team knew they had the resources to pull it off.
“Whereas if that was for another broadcaster, you might start to think, ‘Oh dear. How are we going to do this?’ But with the support of Apple, I really feel that we executed that fantastically,” Dorn says. “It wasn’t a kind of, ‘How do we cut corners to establish that?’ It was spectacular.”
A limited crew took to the waves on one boat, with the cast on another, plus a camera boat and a safety rig. “So it was quite a big operation,” she adds.
Previewing the season, the first two episodes of which dropped last week, with new ones launching every Wednesday, the exec promises viewers more of that Bad Sisters mix of drama, comedy, tears and twists. “It’s Sharon’s voice,” she says, “which is darkly comedic. It’s high drama, but also high comedy, but it’s also really about something. It’s real people with real emotional grounding and something to say about humanity, but in a really entertaining package.”
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