The Better Sister is the year’s most confounding show. It has the premise of an old-school erotic thriller: extravagant wealth, New York City apartment, summer house, high-powered lawyer, perfect wife (updated for the girlboss era), a taboo affair, a sleazy boss, a scary client, passionate sex, the whole kit and kaboodle. What it lacks is those films’ intense focus. This is not because it’s a TV show and thus longer, mind you: TBS’s Prime Video neighbor Dead Ringers knocked its update of David Cronenberg’s cerebral body-horror classic, with Rachel Weisz in the Jeremy Irons role(s), right out of the park, while Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent, with Jake Gyllenhaal subbed in for Harrison Ford, was a rock-solid and steamy legal thriller. 

This episode contained a couple of sexy scenes, I’ll give it that. During a contentious chat while walking on the beach, Nicky confounds her AA buddy Ken by stripping out of her dress and going for a swim in her underwear. She later describes this as a baptism, and indeed her motives don’t appear to be sexual per se, but from a viewer’s perspective that kind of sudden escalation of intimacy between these two new friends is exciting to see.

Elsewhere, Chloe once again has sex with Jake, Adam’s partner and her long-time lover. The two are deeply unhappy, with Jake saying he can no longer even picture tomorrow; Chloe growls to him that he doesn’t need to, because she wants him right now. Gabriel Sloyer and Jessica Biel are gorgeous, which certainly doesn’t hurt the scene’s heat, but it’s the sense that they’re doing something very obviously ill-advised that makes gives it a sort of tragic eroticism.

Rather compellingly, it appears she may have had an ulterior motive. Desperate to save Ethan after his disastrous testimony, his attorney, Michelle Sanders, starts casting around for alternative suspects to create reasonable doubt. While Nicky is ready to fall on her sword for this purpose, the team apparently selects Jake, who spends his own turn on the witness stand taking the Fifth. Jake seems like a bright enough guy to realize what Chloe was up to and forgive her for it; he certainly doesn’t react like he feels sandbagged, as you or I might react were our lover’s son’s lawyer accusing us of murder in court. 

All of this is fine, as far as it goes. What I can’t wrap my mind around is how…first draft so much of this feels. Plot, character, pacing, even music choices had me gesticulating wildly at the screen, sputtering “…what??”

Take that music, for instance. TBS drops a 16-ton weight of a needle this week, using the famous boys’ choir/Mick Jagger intro to the Rolling Stones’ epochal “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Besides being one of the most played-out music cues in the biz, it’s not even accurate to the scene it’s soundtracking, which depicts Ethan’s acquittal. You can’t always get what you want? But you just did! Ethan was found not guilty! This is what you wanted! Shut up, Mick Jagger!

Then there’s the courtroom scenes’ illogic, which continues to knock me out of the narrative at regular intervals. The entire case winds up hinging on Chloe’s surprise revelation on the witness stand that Adam beat her. Confiding this info in Jake is what turns him into a plausible enough suspect to win Ethan his freedom. It also knocks Nicky for a loop, because she’s been keeping the secret of her own physical abuse at Ethan’s hands a secret all this time. The two women wind up holding hands under the bathroom stall divider afterwards, finally able to connect despite all the, you’ll pardon the term, shit that’s come between them. All the DA can do is impotently sputter that this information took him by surprise, but as everyone reminds him, the defense is under no obligation to preview its testimony.

But the prosecution is absolutely under an obligation to preview its evidence, yet the previous episode hinges on them springing Ethan’s secret internet posts on the defense team with no warning. Do the rules matter or don’t they? Are we just winging it as we go along, doing whatever feels more dramatic in the moment?

Because stuff like that happens over and over. Chloe freezes on the stand as if she’s never been prepped. The DA evilly winks at Nicky after cross-examining her (in an aquamarine suit for some reason), as if the jury can’t see it. Jake takes the Fifth about stuff that clearly can’t incriminate him per se, just random questions about the affair. The FBI agent (or is he???) who worked with Adam reneges on his deal with Chloe, fucking her over for no apparent reason and no conceivable benefit. (She’s a powerful person!) Michelle delivers one of the show’s now-standard shoehorned-in wikipedia summaries of racial disparities in the justice system. Does this stuff crank up the volume of the proceedings? Sure, but at the cost of realism.

This extends beyond the courtroom. Nicky, an admitted “drunk,” acts in AA like she can’t figure out why Adam would have made her stop breastfeeding their infant. Ken, who is otherwise anchored by Paul Sparks’s carefully calibrated performance (or maybe I’m just a sucker for anyone who holds their cigarette like that), suggests that she hasn’t told the story of her abuse because she “liked it”; he says he’s just trying to take stock of where she’s coming from, but dropping that kind of provocation on an abuse survivor is wild, bro!

There is, however, one genuinely strong scene in this episode, the cold open. In a flashback, we see Adam in a confessional at a Catholic church. Rather than confide his own sins in the priest, however, he enumerates Ethan’s. He sees the boy as a fat, slothful stoner-gamer who’s ungrateful for everything Adam’s worked so hard to provide him with, and he sees his mother, Chloe, as an enabler who keeps throwing bad money after good where the boy is concerned. Corey Stoll is quietly but very frightening in this scene; you can feel how his anger would warp Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan around itself one after the other. 

It takes the priest to point out that he hasn’t actually confessed any sins to be forgiven, but he grants Adam absolution anyway. When Adam asks what for, the priest replies, “You can name it, son.” He can tell this is a man who can’t even admit to himself the things he’s done wrong, but he knows they’re there, and he’ll need to face up to it sooner or later. 

Stoll’s performance makes the scene, but it’s beautifully and moodily lit as well, it deepens the character of Adam, and it even retroactively explains his career as a prosecutor and his current work with the FBI — he was a do-gooder because he’d done bad and wanted to atone for it. In other words, the whole thing makes sense, aesthetically, narratively, emotionally, intellectually. It can be done. I just wish this show did it more often.

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.