Writing a show that has multiple storylines and tones takes a balancing act that is tough to accomplish. You want the stories to mesh together instead of compete with each other, but that’s not always possible, especially when you have to cram complicated source material into a limited series format. A new series on Prime tries hard to do just that, and doesn’t really succeed.
Opening Shot: A woman in a white dress leaves a swanky dinner party at a massive house in the Hamptons.
The Gist: Chloe Taylor (Jessica Biel), the editor-in-chief of an influential lifestyle magazine, drives to her family’s Hamptons beach house, and goes in. She eventually realizes something is amiss and sees a pool of blood. She runs over and sees her husband, Adam Macintosh (Corey Stoll), lying unresponsive in that pool of blood. After trying to revive him, she calls 911 and is instructed to leave the house in case the killer is still there. Covered in blood, she runs out and trips on the gravel in the driveway.
Thirty-six hours earlier, Chloe is being lauded — and criticized — online for her support of a labor law that addresses gender equality, and that night there is a big gala that will launch their “Women Are Essential” issue. Her stepson Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) is there, as is the magazine’s publisher, Catherine Lancaster (Lorraine Toussaint) and Adam’s boss, Bill Braddock (Matthew Modine). Adam, a lawyer negotiating a huge deal, shows up just before Chloe goes on stage.
All three are headed to their Hamptons beach house separately; Chloe gets a package left with the doorman, Arty (Michael Harney). It’s her face pasted onto an X-rated bondage DVD cover and a threatening note. When she calls Adam, he says she should get a security detail, but brushes it off.
That evening, after the dinner party with Catherine, Bill and others, is when she finds Adam’s body, but this time we see her with a burner phone and a pocket knife. But when she recounts her story to detectives Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) and Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi), she leaves those details out. Guidry isn’t convinced at all about Chloe’s story, and looks at Ethan’s story about his whereabouts with sketpticism.
Ethan is still a minor, so his legal guardian needs to be called: Chloe’s sister, Nicky Macintosh (Elizabeth Banks). Yes, that’s the same last name as Adam. That’s because Nicky, now 5 years sober and living in Cleveland, used to be married to Adam, but her instability led him to file a restraining order and he and Chloe eventually got together. However, they never took Chloe’s parental rights away, because she threatened to end her own life. When Chloe arrives in New York, she insists on staying with Chloe and Ethan, bringing up the ancient disputes the two sisters have had their entire lives.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Better Sister, which was adapted from Alafair Burke’s novel by Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado, has the high-gloss sheen of other rich-people-murder-mystery shows like The Undoing and Big Little Lies. It also feels weirdly similar to the recent Netflix series Sirens.
Our Take: There’s a lot going on in The Better Sister, and by trying to cram it all into eight episodes, Milch and Corrado have created a tonal mess. It’s a murder mystery, it’s a show about the rivalry and secrets between two sisters who are polar opposites, it’s a rich-people-are-awful narrative, and it’s even a cop drama where the detectives banter while solving the crime.
The moments where there story is primarily focused on Chloe are dark and serious, almost noirish in nature. That could be because Biel, while she has been funny in other roles, plays Chloe as dark and serious, even when she’s being sardonic. She’s hiding things, of course, as evidenced by the presence of the pocket knife and burner phone. Also, the reactions of both Chloe and Ethan to Adam’s death are… strange, meaning the both of them have things that they’re not revealing.
That’s all well and good, but then we have Banks, who’s had a bit of an opposite career to Biel in that she’s done plenty of drama but is more known for comedic roles, blowing into town as Nicky. She’s trying to be ominous but more than anything she’s being an irritant to Chloe and, to a lesser extent, Ethan. The weird, messy intertwining of the sisters’ personal lives via Adam will be a constant source of tension between the two, but what it all has to do with Adam’s murder is something we’ve yet to make a connection to.
Then there’s Guidry and Bowen. The detectives’ back and forth with each other are more suggestive of a network procedural than a “prestige” streaming thriller. Dickens’ character, Guidry, is supposed to evoke those determined detectives that see the crime scene in ways others don’t and is always suspicious of whatever any witness tells them. Dickens excels in roles like this — we loved her as the suspicious sheriff in Briarpatch — and Naderi’s more empathetic Bowen is a good counterpoint. But the show isn’t about them.
This is the big problem we have with The Better Sister: All of the elements we described above are fighting for viewers’ attention, and not meshing together well. That will either continue to be the case, or one aspect of the show will win out, minimizing the other two or making them disappear altogether. If it were up to us, we’d concentrate on the relationship between Chloe and Nicky, but even that story may not get the time it deserves if Milch and Corrado keep trying to give time to the competing aspects of the show.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Chloe goes out to smoke on her penthouse’s balcony. Also smoking and watching her from a darker portion of the balcony is Nicky.
Sleeper Star: We are big fans of Michael Harney, and we get the feeling that Arty is much more involved in this story than just being the doorman of Chloe’s building.
Most Pilot-y Line: During a flashback a decade prior, Nicky finds out that Adam and Chloe are “fucking”, in her words. After a nasty exchange, Adam goes to Chloe, “You didn’t do anything wrong,” to which Chloe replies, “She’s my fucking sister. I did everything wrong.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite good performances and good sisterly tension between Biel and Banks, The Better Sister feels like it’s going to be more of an exercise in frustration than a good murder thriller or a good show about sisters with secrets.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.