Bad Sisters – space, class and the reimagining of Dublin

ABSTRACT

In this article, I consider the Apple+ tv series Bad Sisters (2022-) as a transnational production. I take into account the background of its showrunner, Sharon Horgan, and her positioning as a transnational programme maker and comedian. I discuss the series as a remake of the Belgian/Flemish TV series, Clan (English title, The Out-Laws), analysing significant departures, particularly in terms of use of location. I proceed to discuss the overlaps between Bad Sisters and Big Little Lies (HBO 2017–19), notably the strategy of slipping an analysis of coercive control into a drama that makes an overt play for the consumerist pleasures of high-end life-styling. In my analysis of Bad Sisters, I focus particularly on Horgan’s reworking of the topography of suburban Dublin to create an image of a family clustered around a region of significant wealth on the coast, exemplified by their meetings at the Forty Foot swimming area. I discuss the differences between this production and other Irish TV drama, and the consequences for Horgan in making Bad Sisters for Apple TV+ rather than with the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ. I conclude by asking to what extent Bad Sisters, given its glossy aesthetic, can explore social issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharon Horgan
• Bad Sisters
• transnational TV production
• class
• location

Introduction

The Apple+ tv series Bad Sisters (2022) is a mini-series co-written by Sharon Horgan, who also produced and starred in it. The series is based on the Flemish series Clan/The Out-Laws (Beels and Basteyns 2012) which aired on the Belgian TV channel, VTM, in 2012. Horgan’s remake retained the essential plot and characters from the original – a story of five sisters and their plans to murder the husband of one of them, Jean-Claude (now renamed John Paul), referred to throughout as ‘the prick’. The series opens with the funeral of John Paul (Claes Bang) and proceeds in flashbacks to detail the various efforts to kill him. At the same time, two half-brothers from the local insurance company, Thomas (Brian Gleeson) and Matthew Claffin (Daryl McCormack), in order to prevent an insurance pay-out that would bankrupt the firm, attempt to prove that John Paul was murdered. Horgan’s version was made for Apple TV+ under her ‘first look’ deal with them, the first of its kind with ‘name talent’ for the streamer in Europe (Clarke 2019). Initially planned as a one-off single season series, Bad Sisters (Bornebusch et al. 2022) enjoyed such positive reviews and viewing figures that it was renewed for a second season. this article, I locate Bad Sisters within the career trajectory of Horgan, a comedian and transnational showrunner with an established presence in the UK television sector. I reflect on the comparisons between Bad Sisters and Big Little Lies (Vallée and Arnold 2017–19), the black comedy murder mystery set amidst the wealthy homeowners of Monterey. I analyse Bad Sisters as transnational production and focus on the consequences of relocating the series from the fictional Belgian village in which The Out-Laws is set to what is ostensibly the South County Dublin coast. Further to this, I discuss the series as a ‘coming home’ project for Horgan. Drawing on issues of location and class-positioning, I ask whether this formula produced a new image of Irishness on the screen and to what extent it enabled discussions around marital coercive control.

Bad sisters – as transnational production

Bad Sisters turned out to be a good investment for Apple TV+ and was their number one TV show for 2022 (Flixpatrol n.d). It also was well received critically, with overall positive reviews in the local and international press. A brief controversy exploded when the New York Times (Uncredited author 2022) posted a review referring to the central female actors as ‘British’, with some, including Eve Hewson (Hewson 2022), taking to Twitter to remind the paper of their Irishness. Irish actors and other creative personnel are well-used to being labelled British, particularly when their work travels abroad, so none of those involved was probably greatly surprised by this error. While the controversy speaks to questions around mobility, and concomitant loss of national specificity, that commonly accompany transnational production, being taken for, or claimed as British, adds an edginess to the history of postcoloniality that informs the relationship between the two countries. In this particular case, it also reflects the circulation of Irish female screen acting talent in global productions with many of the ‘sisters’ already familiar from UK and other TV.¹

Of all the creative talent involved in Bad Sisters, the one whose career is most evidently marked by transnational mobility is Sharon Horgan. Born in the UK to an Irish mother and New Zealander father, but raised in County Meath, Ireland, Horgan works out of London and Los Angeles. With Clelia Mountford, Horgan established the production company, Merman, to produce both her own TV series and make other television and film projects. Some of her notable TV successes include the cult Pulling (Shapeero 2006–2009); Catastrophe (Taylor and O’Hanlon 2015–2019); Divorce (Bernstein et al. 2016-2019), and Women on the Verge (Griffin 2018). She also gained favourable critical attention for the B.B.C. series, Best Interests (Keillor 2023), in which she played a mother faced with the dilemma of whether to remove life support from her terminally ill daughter. It is difficult to separate Horgan’s professional persona as a now highly regarded showrunner from the characters she plays on screen, even if the latter are clearly marked as fictional. Her screen persona echoes her own life as an Irish woman living in the UK, or moving between the UK and the United States and in interview she often discusses how these fictions reflect her personal experiences. (With its Dublin setting, Women on the Verge is an exception.) Anthony McIntyre (2022) has usefully analysed Horgan’s persona in the above sitcoms as marked by her positioning between both cultures, one that draws on associations between Irishness and simplicity while also playing out elements of the diasporic experience in London. Further, McIntyre argues that Horgan’s transatlantic identity is intrinsic to her ‘quasi-autobiographical mode (167)’. I would add to this that this mode is identified equally as middle-class and thus a break from historical representations of female Irish emigrants as economically and socially disadvantaged (Redmond 2018).

Horgan’s on and off-screen persona is very much in touch with the current zeitgeist. Her screen characters tend to be strong women who are also prone to self-doubt and introspection, her tone often, as McIntyre (169–170) observes, couched in the minor affect of irritation. She usually plays professional women and her characters are conventionally the vehicles to explore the relationship between home and work and to create complex depictions of female sexuality, in her case from singledom through pregnancy and menopause. As detailed above, her off-screen reputation is equally one of a successful female professional working at the top echelons of screen production. Although the financial details of the arrangement with Apple TV + are not in the public domain, we can be certain that their decision to contract Horgan was founded equally on her screen persona and her appeal as a headline female professional. In particular, it is reasonable to guess that it was her transnational performance history that recommended her to Apple TV+ in so far as it would have traction in adding and retaining subscribers from territories where her work or her type of screen persona were familiar. It is also not unreasonable to guess that the budget for Bad Sisters was far in excess of anything that the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ, could have offered her. There is no available information as to whether it was Hogan who proposed this particular remake or whether Apple approached her to make it but one can see why the finished product so fitted Apple’s profile as a transnational content platform.

Bad sisters – the influence of big little lies

The most definable transnational intersection that informs Bad Sisters (apart from the fact, discussed further below, that it is a remake of a Belgian television series) is its overt borrowings from Big Little Lies, the HBO two-season series adapted from the novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty. Both feature the murder of an abusive male by one or other of a group of female friends, and both are set within a milieu of middle-class privilege. Reviewers were swift to pick up the connection (Berman 2022; Framke 2022; Hale 2022) and for those who didn’t, Vogue ran an advertisement feature announcing the new series as ‘the Irish equivalent of Big Little Lies’ (Vogue 2022). It was the display of privilege that most divided academic responses to Big Little Lies, a series that has otherwise been praised for its depiction of coercive control within the domestic environment. Thus, for instance, Anna Marie Bautista (2023) sees Big Little Lies as part of a #MeToo influenced refocus on women’s narratives across quality television. In this, it conforms to a commercial and ideological embrace of ‘conspicuous feminism’, that is ‘explicit, activist and commodifying in its consideration of gendered power structures and inequality (Bautista 2023, 1722)’. The series convincingly demonstrates that domestic abuse can take place in any social milieu and that its traumatic afterlife is a major barrier to recovery. At the same time, its:

protracted focus on feminist issues foregrounding white, affluent and heterosexual protagonists prevents a thorough analysis of less visible feminist considerations regarding race, class and sexuality.

(Bautista 2023, 1734)

In a trenchant analysis of the play for white, affluent audiences that this kind of programme content makes, Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey (2020) have identified a trend in US broadcasting, in which they include Catastrophe, that they describe as programmes made by and about ‘Horrible White people’. These, they argue, are often progressive in intent, are marked by a strong, often female authorial voice, may foreground autobiographical storylines, and are marked by complex relationships with men. Equally, they are centred around privileged lifestyles that, by virtue of their concentration on streaming platforms, propose a kind of universal economy of desirability: ‘Rather than the mass audience of historical broadcasting models, these seemingly niche programs nonetheless create an imagined community based on associations of class, taste, and race rather than local geography’ (Nygaard and Lagerwey 2020, 42). The term ‘horrible’ may seem dismissive but it is more an acknowledgement of how compelling such shows can be. The authors confront this when they consider how these prestige TV shows produce characters with whom White readers, including themselves, may well identify and how painful it may be to concede that such programming ‘can function to sustain White people’s cultural centrality and power’ (Nygaard and Lagerwey 2020, 3).

Evidently, Bad Sisters shares with the kind of shows Nygaard and Lagerwey discuss a play for a deterritorialised audience defined by class and taste. The sisters may not be ‘horrible’, any more than Horgan was ‘horrible’ in Catastrophe. Indeed, Horgan’s professional reputation and her on-screen persona are marked by their unthreatening nature. Still the Garveys are definitely ‘bad’ (killers, even), if only in an ironic and comedic manner. Like Bautista I agree on the need to attenuate any critique of the show, specifically its uncritical take on privilege, with a recognition of its depiction of spousal abuse and its celebration of female strength in bonding. John Paul (also known as JP) is a monstrous character, controlling of his immediate family, prone to violence, manipulative, and eventually revealed as a rapist. He relentlessly gaslights Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) his wife, falsely accuses their kindly neighbour Roger (Michael Smiley) of paedophilia, threatens to expose his sister-in-law, Ursula’s (Eva Birthistle) extra-marital affair with artist Ben (Peter Coonan) and keeps his late father’s body in the freezer of his family home. Bad Sisters is fundamentally a melodrama crossed with a thriller, genres that are defined by their excess rather than any serious indexical purpose and the audience is assuredly not being primed here to respond in the manner of the Garveys. We still need to ask ourselves to what extent Bad Sisters offers any solution to the specifics of marital coercive control. I return to this question of progressive intent in my Conclusion; what I focus on immediately is how Bad Sisters’ transnational identity complicates its production of class and place, and how that places it in tension with existing screen depictions of Dublin.

Class and place in bad sisters

Not only does Bad Sisters model its class dynamics (to some extent) on Big Little Lies, it also makes a deliberate play for the glamour factor of upmarket coastal homes. This was one of the selling points of Big Little Lies whose Monterey setting, its characters’ luxury homes and wealthy lifestyles generated a secondary discourse invoking the consumerist pleasures of property porn. To cite just one example amongst many, an article in Town and Country magazine (Kim 2019) assured viewers of the upcoming second season that ‘the five ladies’ […] enviably rich lifestyles in Monterey Country are still one of the reasons why BLL is such a delightful guilty pleasure’.

In relation to the connection, Horgan has said:

[W]e referenced Big Little Lies. But for me, Big Little Lies was escapism, it was beauty, you know. Whereas we wanted this to feel as grounded and real as you could with four sisters trying to kill a man over and over. It was really important to me that it didn’t feel aspirational or glamorous. Bibi has a beautiful house, Eva’s house is wonderful, but it’s the family home that she sort of stayed in.

(in Allen 2022)

The key word here is ‘aspirational’. Horgan’s reconstruction of Dublin’s upmarket coastal suburbs depends on an assumption of family wealth. The Garveys are not aspirational, they are seen to be entitled to occupy these homes because of their class background. At the same time, in order to render this effect ‘real’, Horgan had to create an imagined Dublin:

We made up our own geography. […] There are several places that we wanted in our show. In order to create this world, we made our own map. We knew exactly where we wanted Eva’s house to be [in South County Dublin], but it was actually in Howth [North County Dublin]. We filmed in Malahide [another northern suburb of Dublin] a lot. And you know, there’s some areas of London that we filmed in as well to get JP’s house and we were in Skerries [a seaside town north of Dublin]. We were in Northern Ireland for Bibi’s house. We located where each place was, and apart from the Claffins who we said were in the town over, we wanted them all to be in the same area

(in Allen 2022)

Some of these decisions may have arisen from convenience, given that the series was shot during the COVID-19 pandemic and the producers were UK-based, but it seems more that Horgan had a distinctive image of the Garvey sisters’ environment that was not actually to be found in the South County Dublin location where the series is set. Nor was it to be found in the original series, and while the plot of Bad Sisters adheres closely to The Out-Laws, its use of locations is markedly different. The Flemish series is set in the fictional town of Vredegem. Although we get little sense of its actual topography, it is clearly a solidly middle-class environment. The opening credits of the first episode identify each family member via an establishing shot of their house, suggesting a strong link between status, identity and dwelling place. Eva’s (Barbara Sarafian) as the family home is a substantial red-brick turreted building with somewhat dated wallpaper, heavy mahogany furnishings, and a rather unexpected family photo with each child wearing what appears to be a Scottish kilt. The interiors speak to an unassuming bourgeois family background. Veerle (Kristina Van Pellicom), harassed parent with a secret lover, by contrast, lives in a very ordinary mid-terrace dwelling, hinting that since her marriage she has come down in the world. The Delcorps’ family home, in which Jean Claude’s (Dirk Roofthooft) mother, Min (Sien Eggers), now lives is a monument to Gothic excess. Min’s late husband was a taxidermist and the interiors are filled with stuffed animals; even the doorbell is built into the anus of a stuffed fox, again providing an allusive connection between Jean Claude’s identity and his domestic origins. A brief exchange in Bibi’s (Ruth Becquart) modernist house between her and the insurers illustrates how unadventurous the local architecture is. Walking into the living area, Matthias Dewitt (Geert Van Rampelberg) comments ‘You have a very modern house for Vredegem’. (In the equivalent scene in Bad Sisters, the insurer simply says, ‘This is a really handsome space’.) At times in the series, we also get the sense that nothing much really happens in Vredegem, and indeed Bekka (Maaike Neuville), the youngest sister, reassures the other sisters that no one would believe that five women from Vredegem would commit a murder.

The Garvey family in Bad Sisters, by contrast, are visually constructed as members of a privileged, bohemian Irish middle-class. Eva (Horgan) lives in the family home, a substantial colonial-style period house set in slightly run down grounds with verandas overlooking the sea. On the soundtrack, the call of seagulls is a constant. The house is fashionably cluttered with houseplants, wooden furniture, tasteful art on the walls, family photographs, a Belfast sink, interiors painted in strong greens and terracotta, and an exposed brick fireplace with solid fuel range. Family occasions have been held there since the early deaths of the Garvey parents in a car crash, with Eva presiding as matriarch in their place. The sisters congregate around the kitchen table to mark birthdays and Christmas and, increasingly, as the story unfolds, to plot the murder of their brother-in-law. As is common in such female-centred series, a marker of sophistication is being seen to unwind with a glass of wine, a trope identified by Tammie M. Kennedy as crucial to mainstream television’s mediated performances of feminism. It is she notes, particularly associated with educated, successful, middle-class women and ‘a way for women to navigate the tensions of their personal and professional choices’ (2017, 182). Eva is positioned very squarely in this category – simultaneously enjoying a high-profile career working as an accountant in a leading firm of architects, their offices cast in imposing glass and steel and the materfamilias of the Garveys. Two of the other sisters, Ursula and Bibi (Sarah Greene) are also professionals. Ursula is a nurse, which enables her to supply the necessary knowledge to help with advice on poisoning. At home, she is the somewhat frazzled mother of three boisterous children, one with Down’s Syndrome. As her long-suffering husband is beginning to suspect, her real pressure comes from her relationship with Ben. Becka (Eve Hewson) is a masseuse and the only sister who is not a home-owner. Her apartment, however, is set in gardens, close to a waterway and lock. The interiors are much like those in her family home, with exposed red brick walls, shelves of artfully placed found objects and memorabilia, vividly coloured throws, and fashionably painted wooden furniture. Only Grace is designated as a ‘housewife’. The series makes it clear that this is how she is positioned by JP, who insists on calling her ‘Mammy’, a mode of address that hints at his own sexual dysfunction. In contrast to the family home, Grace and JP’s house is a functional, suburban build, though still backed with evident wealth and boasting expensive furnishing and interiors. JP’s yacht takes up much of the front driveway.

There is a clear distinction between the adherence to a bourgeois aesthetics in The Out-Laws and the embrace of middle-class bohemianism in Bad Sisters. As in the original series, home and lifestyling define identity, but in this case through a classic Bourdieuian articulation of taste.² The Garveys may not be conspicuously wealthy but their family home is a testament to assumptions around the need to define oneself through the rejection of mass-produced furnishings and the uniformity of modern housing estates. Not only do the interiors of the family home, Bibi’s house, and Becka’s apartment speak to the link between style and identity, the setting of the family home and the spaces of their shared leisure activities are another marker of wealth. The only significant character in the drama, by contrast, whose home is not on display, is Matthew Claffin’s. For all its nods to inclusivity (Bibi is in a same-sex relationship and has a Black child; Ursula’s son is Down’s Syndrome, none of which is in the original) the series seems unable to imagine the younger, mixed-race Claffin brother’s habitus.³

The most recognizable setting in Horgan’s remake is the Forty Foot bathing area where the sisters go for the annual Christmas swim and where they first plot to murder John Paul. Named after the British regiment (the Fortieth Foot) that was stationed there, this is one of Ireland’s best-known open-air bathing areas. With its setting underneath the Joyce Tower, where Ulysses opens, it is encircled by some of the most expensive property in Ireland.⁴ Another architectural landmark is ‘Geragh’, a modernist house designed by one of Ireland’s leading architects of the day, Michael Scott (1905–1989). It is here that Ben, Ursula’s lover, has his artist’s studio. Although the geography is not quite clear, Bad Sisters suggests that Eva lives near the Forty Foot and the other sisters are only a short drive away. As Horgan explained in interview (above), she wanted to give the impression that the family was clustered around the Forty Foot area, and it is worth exploring further why she wanted to make ‘up our own geography’ and how this differentiated Bad Sisters from much other Irish film and television production.

The transnational dynamic of lifestyling

The mise-en-scène of Bad Sisters provides a very clear illustration of Nygaard and Lagerway’s ‘imagined community based on associations of class, taste, and race rather than local geography’. It makes a conscious play for an audience that appreciates the markers of taste exhibited in the settings and homes occupied by the various sympathetic characters in the series. In this it also reflects the stylistic decision of the creators of Big Little Lies and other dramas set amidst the privileged classes. There is a uniformity of upmarket lifestyling or ‘property porn’ that transcends geographic boundaries. It is also very much in tune with exactly the kind of consumers and taste-makers of Apple’s other products and thus an exemplary production for their then relatively new SVOD. With its focus on strong female characters and its problematising of masculinity, it also pitches itself at the transnational female viewership that Nygaard and Lagerway identify as crucial to this kind of programming.

Equally, the setting and lifestyle choices exhibited by the series reflect Horgan’s own identity as a transnational content creator and her screen persona as a beleaguered middle-class professional. Her previous TV work anticipated the tone of Bad Sisters in its combination of comedic and catastrophic, often semi-autobiographical, life experiences. It is interesting here to compare Nygaard and Lagerwey’s analysis of Horgan’s on-screen/off-screen persona with McIntyre’s. The former read her TV shows, notably Pulling and Catastrophe as reflecting a British comic sensibility constructed around (2020, 65), ‘irony, self-loathing, complexity, and general bleakness’. This, they argue, is aligned with ‘a specific transatlantic classed taste culture’ (Nygaard and Lagerwey 2020, 65, emphasis in original) that is also apparent in upmarket American TV shows. McIntyre, as cited above, reads Horgan’s persona as articulating a transatlantic Irishness. I see this as the more convincing approach, which is to view Horgan as a sweary, articulate, anti-Establishment outsider, whose de-centred status is determined as much as by her Irishness as by her gender. Being Irish sanctions her bad attitude. At the same time, her middle-class identity acts as a tacit reassurance to those middle-class viewers referenced above that she is still one of them.

The ’Irishness’ of bad sisters

There’s no grid on which to map expressions of Irishness, but there are specific markers of national identity that may be isolated within Bad Sisters’ overall construction. The identity of the actors is one and despite the best efforts of the New York Times to claim otherwise, the central female roles all came to their parts with careers in playing Irish characters and in Irish productions. (In keeping with the Big Little Lies model, the male/villain is played by an overseas’ actor: Alexander Skarsgård in one, Claes Bang in the other). The accents are authentically Irish and the repeated use of scatological language would ring true to an Irish ear. As we have discussed, given Horgan’s imagined map of Dublin, authenticity of place is more tricky to establish particularly since the series avoids deploying the obvious signifiers of central Dublin (the Ha’penny Bridge, the Spire, the Dart and Luas transport lines) or the tourist imagery of the West of Ireland. At the same time, the location of the sisters’ houses so close to the sea does reflect an Irish location, even one that does not make topographical sense.

If we take transnationalism to mean not so much the loss of the national as its repositioning within a global circulation of funding, exhibition and audiences, then it is pertinent to ask just how local Bad Sisters is. Those involved, including Horgan, have emphasised that this was a ‘coming home’ series (in Byrne 2022), and this is a useful entry point into understanding the series’ mood and the actors’ response to being labelled ‘British’. Making Bad Sisters returned Horgan to the environment that her persona so often draws on. This further allowed her to position herself at the centre of the fiction, in her own home, with her own family, and most particularly in the kind of upmarket, suburban middle-class environment with which she was familiar. As she said:

I’d never tapped into my own Irishness really. In Catastrophe a little, because I had brought in the family element and that was really satisfying and what I liked more than anything was the Irish response to it. That you could reflect certain things on screen and I got a real buzz out of people relating to that (in Byrne 2022).⁵

She doesn’t explain further exactly what those ‘certain things’ were, but we might guess that they included the large Irish family, the sense of a tight-knit grouping of strong, mostly professional women, as well as an oppressive male character who is also defined by his explicit Catholicism. In a different interview Horgan noted that, ‘John Paul is a righteous man who feels he has God and religion on his side and sees the sisters as immoral. What a metaphor’ (in Cheney 2022).⁶ The latter point, which at its most extreme sees Bibi losing her eye when it is punctured by JP’s dashboard religious statuette, recalls a history of oppression of Irish women that is now symbolically righted with his murder (‘what a metaphor’).⁷

Given that so many of the ‘sisters’ have enjoyed significant success in overseas’ television and film, this was a rare opportunity to shoot a high-profile TV series in Ireland that not only foregrounded Irish performers but many of whose episodes were directed by Irish director, Dearbhla Walsh, with all episodes directed by women. As we outline in an industry of career construction in Irish film, TV Drama and theatre, women actors are particularly mobile, reflecting a long history of the dominance of roles for male actors in Irish screen dramas (Barton and Murphy 2020). The casting and direction of Bad Sisters further underlines the argument made by McIntyre (2022, 164) in relation to Horgan’s career that she: ‘is using her own growing influence to develop opportunities for her talented compatriots’.

In interview (Byrne 2022), Eva Birthistle has said: ‘It doesn’t feel like any Irish show that I have seen. […] I think that Ireland looks different, that it has a different tone than any show that I have seen’. I take this as a reference not just to its borrowings from Big Little Lies and its identity as a female-centred drama, but its unproblematic focus on, even celebration of, middle-class suburban privilege. In this, it diverges significantly from much indigenous Irish film and TV production. To summarise very crudely, Irish film and TV have been wary of foregrounding or even critiquing middle-class characters. Most Irish film and TV programming has been guided by a desire to expose rural and urban social disadvantage. Over and again, Irish screen narratives, exemplified in the two recent high-profile Oscar nominated releases, An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl (Baireád 2022) and The Banshees of Inisherin (McDonagh 2022), have found in the dysfunctional rural family or in dysfunctional male relationships, a wider history of social neglect and alienation. Equally, inner-city Dublin (recently the scene of anti-immigrant rioting), repeatedly offers the locus to interrogate social disadvantage. There are, of course, exceptions, most notably the TV and streaming hit of the COVID-19 pandemic, Normal People (Abrahamson and Macdonald 2020) and its much less popular successor, Conversations with Friends (Abrahamson and Welham 2022), both of which foregrounded narratives of white, largely female, angst within privileged bohemian settings. Normal People, however, was funded by B.B.C. Three, Hulu and Screen Ireland (the national body for screen production and funding) not by the national broadcaster, RTÉ. This was, as the series co-director, Lenny Abrahamson, explained, because of the ‘chronic situation in terms of funding with RTÉ’ (in McGreevy 2020).⁸ Both of these series were made by Element Pictures, one of Ireland’s most successful production companies, who are also responsible for producing the recent films of Abrahamson and Yorgos Lanthimos. In addition, they made the TV series, The Dry (Breathnach 2022), which ran first on British terrestrial TV (ITV X) where it was promoted as the ‘Irish Fleabag’ (Waller-Bridge 2016–19). The Dry was unusual in its focus on a middle-class family (the daughter is a recovering alcoholic whose return home to Dublin from London lights the fire under a cauldron of simmering family tensions).⁹

Bad Sisters, on the other hand, was entirely financed by Apple TV+ (with support from the Irish government’s S481 Tax Incentive scheme). Undoubtedly, such an evidently high-end production could never have been made on an RTÉ budget. Nor, for that matter, could another recent Irish hit series, Derry Girls (Lennox 2018–22). These examples indicate that ambitious Irish programme makers have little choice but to make straight for international platforms and television channels to realise their work. Similarly, the Irish viewing public, who watched Bad Sisters in such large numbers, was forced onto streaming platforms to see an Irish-set and themed series. In this, these productions bear out Amanda Lotz’s (2021, 200) general observation that Netflix [and other streaming platforms] operate alongside the national broadcaster but ‘also thrive[s] on underlying dissatisfaction with available options’. It may well be that it was the very fact that it was not an RTÉ production, with all the national broadcaster’s budgetary restrictions and history of programming, that so recommended Bad Sisters to Irish viewers.

As the national broadcaster, RTÉ (2022) has a remit to make content that upholds democracy, reflects diversity, and attracts the most talented people to create programmes for Irish audiences. The streaming platforms have no such obligations. Thus, the comments by Horgan and Birtwhistle cited here reflect a sense that making Bad Sisters for Apple TV+ was a liberating experience that opened up creative possibilities not on offer via RTÉ.

Bad sisters as social critique

As we have already discussed, Bad Sisters conforms very obviously to the Big Little Lies model of embedding social critique within a distractingly eye-pleasing milieu of wealth and privilege. The question remains as to what extent it operates as an exploration of domestic abuse or can be read as a revenge narrative on Irish patriarchy. There is undoubtedly a level of social critique in Bad Sisters’ depiction of a marriage governed by coercive control. Each of the sisters has experienced JP’s misogyny in ways that are very specifically gendered, and through violence enacted against their bodies (of which rape is the most extreme example). He is the most banal of abusers, his monstrosity concealed behind a veneer of middle-class respectability and justified by an appeal to religiosity and family values that bears echoes of far-right ideologies. The audience is left in no doubt that he is a man better disposed of.

It is more difficult to argue that this was what the show was foregrounding thematically, or that it offered a realisable solution to that situation. In common with Big Little Lies, it has a point to make about abuse within a middle-class setting. Still, it is hard to be certain that this is what audiences took away from it. It is far more the case that Bad Sisters offered a fantasised vision of female empowerment and revenge within a recognisable genre. As Nygaard and Lagerwey (2020, 129) note: ‘female friendship and the idea of women communicating, laughing, accepting, and growing stronger with each other is a form of resistance; strengthening the bonds between women becomes a feminist act’. In this the series has much in common with Derry Girls, where solidarity is wrought out of competitive acts, and both share a sense of Irish women having their moment, both behind and in front of the camera. In fact, it is this that I would posit is the strength of the social message of both series – that female creative workers can band together and storm the male citadels of public life and entertainment broadcasting.

Conclusion

Bad Sisters was such a hit that a second season was unexpectedly commissioned. What made it so successful was almost certainly its recognizability as transnational fare in the style of Big Little Lies. What Horgan achieved, other than the quality of the script and casting, was to re-present Ireland as a scenic suburban location populated with strong willed attractive [white] female characters. Unlike the ‘wild Irish girl’ of an older Romantic gendering of Irish identity, the women at the heart of Horgan’s drama reflect her own professional and fictional positioning, not as objects of desire, but as feisty individuals who stick together against patriarchy. In this they convey an empowering fantasy of sisterhood that is facilitated by their access to class privilege. This impression was also made possible by what appears to be a lavish budget that gave the series a glossy quality that local TV could never have achieved. It is at once exhilaratingly Irish and not Irish at all, a transnational reinvention of place and personhood that in its aspirational qualities creates a comforting illusion of possibilities.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Barton

Ruth Barton is Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on Irish cinema and her works include Irish National Cinema (Routledge 2004) and Acting Irish in Hollywood (Irish Academic Press 2006). She has also written critical biographies of the Hollywood star, Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in Film (University Press of Kentucky 2010) and the Irish silent era director, Rex Ingram: Rex Ingram, Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (University Press of Kentucky 2014). Her latest monograph, Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2019 by Manchester University Press.

Notes

1. Anne-Marie Duff is second-generation Irish and best known for major roles in Shameless (Walker and Threlfall 2004–2013) and in film, often in Irish parts. Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Eve Hewson were born and educated in Ireland and have moved between Irish, UK and USA-based productions.

2. In Bourdieu’s classic analysis of the cultural construction of taste, he defines this as (Bourdieu 1984, 173) ‘the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, [it] is the generative formula of life-style, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic sub-spaces, furniture, clothing, language or body hexis’.

3. It would take another paper to interrogate Irish actor, Darryl McCormack’s, positioning in Irish-set dramas but here it is hard not to see him as the tokenistic boyfriend of colour, whose character is there primarily to reflect well on Becka and her openness to Otherness.

4. During the COVID-19 pandemic the Forty Foot became something of a talking point for the rise in popularity not just of sea swimming but dry robes (Carroll 2020). For property prices, see: Central Statistics Office (2023).

5. Episodes of Catastrophe that are actually set in Ireland include Season 3, episode 5 and 6, when Sharon (Sharon Horgan) travels to Ireland with her brother Fergal (Jonathan Forbes) to say goodbye to her father, Des (Gary Lilburn).

6. The name John Paul (JP) was very commonly given to babies in Ireland following the successful visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979. Given that he appears to be in his forties, this both explains the fictional John Paul’s name but adds a layer of Catholic referencing that would be very readable to an Irish audience of a certain age. It conflicts oddly with his Scandinavian heritage, which seems to be a nod to Big Little Lies, and remains unexplained in the series. However, we might guess that this specific name renders the character more Irish.

7. Clause 41.2 in the Irish Constitution, colloquially known as the ‘Woman in the Home clause’, specifically establishes woman as mother and one whose place is in the home. At the time of writing, a referendum is planned to ask the Irish electorate if they consent to alternative wording.

8. Since then, as a result of a confluence of events, including a series of financial scandals, has led to significant numbers of the public withholding payment of the licence fee. This has exacerbated the already precarious financial situation at RTÉ.

9. In this case, RTÉ did co-finance the series. I would suggest that we see The Dry as being more of an Element Pictures production than one that is consistent with RTÉ’s output. While this is not the place to analyse Element Pictures’ creative identity, the company does seem to be inclined to place its output strategically within the universal marketplace (‘Irish Fleabag’) which includes dramas created around middle-class identities and dilemmas.