If The Better Sister wants to play things light, that’s fine. Most murder mysteries use a little humor to keep things from getting too relentlessly grim. It’s best, however, if that humor isn’t ten years past its sell-by date, though. In this episode of TBS, there are jokes about phone dongles, public radio podcasts, Siri dialing the wrong number, “yucking your yum,” and how everybody loves the Kennedys. Look, I wish it were 2015 again as much as anybody, but that’s sadly not the reality we inhabit. We need something a little fresher than this wilted lettuce. 

Unfortunately, that “eh, good enough” approach carries over to the character building as well. Nicky may well be revealed to be the true title character at some point, but for now she remains a sloppy caricature of the underclass. She’s aggrieved at being asked not to dress like a slob at her son’s hearing. She kicks her feet up on Chloe’s dashboard and argues when asked to put them down again. As noted above, she has a good hardy-har-har about the word “dongle.” She’s poor, not twelve years old.

But she remains a ferocious advocate for her son, Ethan. Too ferocious, in fact: She deletes texts between Ethan and his drug-dealer buddy and would-be alibi Kevin (Hale Lytle) on a burner phone Chloe finds, before Chloe notices. She also bleaches the knife she finds hidden in Chloe’s glove compartment, which sure does match the description of the stab wounds we hear from Detectives Guidry and Bowen. I’m sure none of this will look incriminating at all. 

To be fair, Chloe is no longer sleepwalking through the situation: She spends the episode riding herd on Ethan’s lawyer Michelle for updates on Ethan’s status. But though Michelle does her best as a favor to her fellow lawyer Jake — the late Adam Macintosh’s frenemy at work — she can’t stop the smirking Evil Prosecutor from prevailing. The oddball judge has Ethan held without bail as a potential flight risk, since he has a history of wriggling out of trouble (weed, bringing a gun to school) that kids who are less wealthy, well-connected, and white would have their lives ruined over.

But Ethan offers Michelle a good reason for the gun: He was trying to get it out of the house. A flashback to a night out with Adam, Ethan, and Jake, in which Adam constantly bullies the boy right in front of his coworker, indicates why Ethan might have been afraid for his father to have access to a firearm. 

Adam was pulling a fast one at work, too. Though his boss, walking sexual harassment lawsuit Bill Braddock, covers it up, Adam’s last meeting with his big client the Gentry Group was an unauthorized one. Bill suspects Adam was trying to leave the firm and poach his biggest client on the way out. He tasks Jake with getting to Adam’s house and hoovering up any files they wouldn’t want falling into police hands. The Gentry Group strikes me as unlikely to be gentle about having its secrets divulged.

But there are secrets everywhere you look in this episode. On a dark note, Nicky and Chloe alike are both leaving their abusive father (Frederick Weller) out of their conversations, though he looms as an almost physical presence in the life of Nicky in particular. In one memorable scene, smoke suddenly starts wafting through the car in which she’s sitting alone, revealed by a camera cut to have been blown by her phantom dad in the back seat. Flashbacks to a hunting expedition reveal that Nicky was too afraid to slit a wounded rabbit’s throat, so it fell to her kid sister to do the deed. 

That night, Nicky listens to her father run her down as a stupid, incompetent narcissist to her mom (Janel Moloney), who doesn’t protest. There’s something truly upsetting about his jovial bluntness during this conversation, as he calls his daughter useless the way you or I might talk about a point guard having a disappointing season. That kind of casual cruelty leaves a lasting mark.

And Chloe has one last secret: her affair with Jake. When she gets back to the summer house with Nicky after Ethan’s disastrous day in court, she “goes for a run”…right over to Jake’s nearby house. Though she chews him out for sharing information with Michelle about his relationship with her and Ethan, they soon get into a passionate clinch — one of those 1980s Jeremy Irons kind of embraces where you’re just kind of pawing at each other erotically for a while. As candidates for an affair go, “husband’s handsome coworker” is a fairly pedestrian one, but the makeout sesh is good stuff at least. 

So far, The Better Sister is one of those take-what-you-can-get kind of shows. Biel is an obvious selling point. Corey Stoll playing his umpteenth type-A shitheel — I mean, there’s a reason he gets these kinds of roles, because he’s really good at them. Nicky’s survival instincts, like insisting on a bigger tip-slash-bribe for Arty the doorman, cut right through the character’s clownishness. There are one or two ostentatiously arty shots that don’t really communicate anything but are fun enough to look at. Guidry and Bowen as a sort of arranged work marriage, where she’s older and gay and doesn’t like his personal grooming but they constantly flirt by making fun of one another anyway, is a fun choice for roles we’d otherwise have seen a thousand times. Cut the ancient punchlines, take Nicky out of her Billy Joel baseball tees (which doesn’t make sense anyway, she’s not even from Long Island) and make her a real person instead of a rough sketch, and those individual components may cohere into something memorable.

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.