We love watching the ultra-rich suffer. This has always been true to one extent or another, but less than 15 years ago we mostly loved watching the ultra-rich either dress up in science-fiction armor and blast supervillains, or buy Dakota Johnson lingerie for spanking purposes. But the days of Iron Man and 50 Shades of Grey gave way to the time of Succession and The White Lotus some time ago, and the advent of an American government run for the sole purpose of taking money out of your pocket and putting into Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s has only sharpened the viewing public’s metaphorical guillotines.
Into this heady atmosphere emerges The Better Sister. Adapted by Olivia Milch from the novel by Alafair Burke, it’s the story of an extremely put-together go-getter who’s tied to her good-for-nothing sister by the man they both loved and the child they both share through him, brought back together when that man gets murdered. There’s a lot of potential in the idea. There’s a lot less potential in the execution.
Jessica Biel stars as Chloe Taylor, who, for now at least, is the title character. The editor of a lifestyle magazine of indeterminate nature called The Real Thing, she’s gorgeous, glamorous, wealthy, and well-married — her husband Adam Macintosh (Corey Stoll) is a high-powered Manhattan attorney. She also has good politics, as far as limousine liberalism goes: Her pet cause is the labor rights of essential workers, who are predominantly women. So there’s a girlboss ResistLib element to it, but also a DSA inroads-with-the-working-class aspect.
Still, I don’t see any reason Chloe giving a speech about this issue would go mega-viral, as it’s claimed in a clumsy exposition-laden scene set during an editorial meeting at the mag. In this day and age it’s also difficult to imagine an honest-to-god print magazine becoming mainstream, low-information-voter popular enough to warrant death threats from 4chan types, or launch a promising political career. (Even when magazines ruled the world, it’s not like we got Governor Jann Wenner or Senator Graydon Carter or President Anna Wintour or Chief Justice Helen Gurley Brown out of the deal.)
Be that as it may, this is the basic setup for Chloe’s life. She goes to work. She attends soirées with weird friends, like Adam’s flamboyant and very rich boss Bill (Matthew Modine), and Chloe’s own well-connected, ex-addict mentor and press guru Catherine (Lorraine Toussaint). (Both of these individuals have truly magnificent heads of hair.) Sometimes Adam is there, but often he’s not, as his most important client, the mysterious Gentry group, works him to death.
Until one night Adam turns up dead for real. Returning home from one of the aforementioned parties, Chloe slips out of her heels and walks around her summer home on the East End of Long Island barefoot, gazing at the view. (Speaking of views, there are worse ones than watching Jessica Biel traipse around in backless dresses, and boy does the show know it.) Then in rapid succession, Chloe notices an overturned vase, then steps in a puddle of blood, then sees body of her husband, stabbed to death — an unnervingly convincing sequence of small details leading to a life-destroying shock.
Panicking, Chloe calls 911, who advise her to exit the house in case the killer is still inside. She runs outside, but trips and falls, scraping her hands and knees. That’s more or less how the cops, led by Detectives Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) and Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi), find her.
Only there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. When she fell, Chloe was carrying a knife for safety’s sake; the next day, she stumbles across it in the driveway gravel, then stashes it in her car’s glove compartment so it won’t raise any questions since it’s covered in her husband’s blood. Everything Chloe had was covered in blood by the end of that evening, but I wouldn’t expect the police to be quite so understanding. (Putting Chloe in a white dress so the red stuff shows up more vividly was a nice touch; professional wrestlers tend to wear white ring gear if they know their match is gonna get bloody.) Chloe also has a second, secret burner phone that she dismantles and disposes of along the beach when no one’s looking.
And she’s not even the cops’ chief suspect. Thanks to a cut on his arm and a gap in his alibi — he’s basically ratted out by a buddy who sell schwag weed to high schoolers — Detective Guidry in particular turns her attention to Adam’s son Ethan. Adam’s son, not Chloe’s: Though Chloe and Adam are married and Chloe has raised Ethan for years, his biological mother is Nicky Macintosh (Elizabeth Banks), Chloe’s white-trash addict asshole sister. It also turns out that because Adam and Chloe wanted to avoid a legal dispute that could potentially cause Nicky to self-harm, she’s still Ethan’s legal guardian. Expect some custody wrangling in the future, whether or not Ethan’s behind bars for his father’s murder at the time.
The very idea that such wrangling would take place is right where The Better Sister loses me. You’re trying to tell me that a rich, powerful, intelligent woman who knows full well that she married the ex-husband of her junkie sister and is now raising her son has no contingency plans in place to fend off custody challenges? It strains credulity. And hell, even if she didn’t have a plan, what she has is money and power and fame, three things that effectively meant you can do whatever you want in our legal system provided your opponent is poorer than you. At one point in a flashback, she fails to remove the boy from a loud, obscenity-laden argument with the tackily-dressed Nicky, who crashes his birthday party; I cannot name a single parent of my acquaintance who wouldn’t have gotten the fuck out of there with the kid instantly. I just don’t see a world where Chloe hasn’t already had Nicky arrested by the NYPD on trumped-up charges.
Speaking of his infernal majesty, the advent of Trump II renders a lot of this stuff antiquated. It’s hard to see the biggest obstacle to Chloe’s political career as internet trolls in a climate where the President of the United States of America is an adjudicated rapist who reads white supremacist memes to the president of South Africa during state visits. For a while any project conceived prior to the fascist takeover is going to feel like a weird artifact from a land before time, and that’s no fault of The Better Sister’s own, but it’s a problem.
This is not to say the writing is always unequal to the task. When Nicky shows up at Chloe’s apartment, there’s a great bit where some poor schlub she met in the airport and convinced to carry her luggage comes along with her. (“I’ll email you,” he says as he leaves.) This ability to wrangle a total stranger into doing her bidding tells me a lot more about Nicky, and in a lot more interesting way, than a cheetah-print top and a miniskirt, like a hooker from a David Lee Roth video. The best thing about it? It doesn’t go anywhere! It’s just there to provide color and context for the kind of person Nicky is, in a way that briefly and rewardingly short-circuits the narrative.
But nothing else in the episode, directed by Craig Gillespie (Pam & Tommy) from a script by Milch, feels this rewardingly anomalous. The exposition-heavy dialogue in particular holds your hand while introducing you to these characters and their world in way that evinces a lack of trust in the audience’s intelligence. Andor creator Tony Gilroy has talked about how hard he worked to avoid “So-and-so! Look how you’ve grown! I can’t believe it’s been five years since we last saw each other in the Outer Rim” blah blah blah bullshit after one of the show’s many significant time jumps; that kind of dialogue is virtually all that The Better Sister has to offer for the moment.
However, it also offers the following: Jessica Biel, Elizabeth Banks, Kim Dickens, Corey Stoll, Lorraine Toussaint, Matthew Modine, et cetera. If it does nothing else, 2025 puts paid to the idea that a stacked cast alone makes a show worth watching; Modine, for example, recently starred with Robert De Niro, Angela Bassett, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Gaby Hoffman, and Dan Stevens in a show called Zero Day that you don’t remember because it was utter dogshit. But you’ve gotta have faith that interesting actors can elevate average material — that’s a big part of the fun of covering live-action narrative fiction for a living. Especially as the story goes on and presumably grows away from these early, very rudimentary roots, this is the kind of cast that can grow into something worth cultivating.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.