Not every book needs a multi-episode television adaptation. And based on how most of those adaptations turn out, most do not. As adapted from Alafair Burke’s 2019 novel of the same name, however, Amazon’s The Better Sister features characters trapped in a familial web so tangled that it all but justifies its existence.
High-powered publishing exec Chloe Taylor (Jessica Biel) is married to lawyer Adam (Corey Stoll), who used to be married to Chloe’s alcoholic sister, Nicky (Elizabeth Banks). Adam and Nicky’s teenage son, Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan), has been raised for most of his life in a world of wealth and privilege by Chloe, who moved to New York with Adam and Ethan when Nicky’s addiction took a particularly dangerous turn. Chloe has managed to keep her salacious past from the general public, but when Adam is murdered, her personal affairs are thrust into the spotlight—and Nicky comes calling, newly sober yet no less of a wild card.
The Better Sister isn’t quite a thriller and not quite a mystery. Nicky’s intentions appear to be above board, born of earnest concern for her estranged son and sister, while the question of who killed Adam is all but tabled for the middle stretch of the series. These may sound like bugs, but under series creator Olivia Milch (who has brought with her several alumni from her father’s magnum opus, Deadwood), they become features, as The Better Sister smartly turns its focus away from rickety plotting in favor of prickly dialogue delivered by amusing odd couples.
A lot of mileage is gotten out of the contrast between the two, ever-squabbling sisters, thanks in part to the chemistry between Biel and Banks. Nicky has had enough run-ins with police to convince Chloe not to say anything to the cops, but she’s also oblivious to the inner workings of high society. In one scene, Nicky brings a container of gazpacho to a wake thrown by the sort of people who can afford catering several times over. Equally funny are Guidry (Kim Dickens) and Bowen (Bobby Naderi), the two semi-competent detectives assigned to the murder case, one barely capable of concealing her glee over suspicions of Chloe and the other shamed into shaving his enormous cop mustache halfway through the series.
The characters behave like the frail figments of the author’s imagination, unconnected to a world outside or even to each other except as the plot dictates.
To call The Better Sister “character-driven” isn’t quite accurate, as the plot dictates character throughout, incoherence be damned. We don’t have much context for what these characters’ lives were like before Adam’s murder, and you get the sense that it’s because we’d cry foul if we knew what the series artificially withholds for maximum dramatic impact. The series never seems to have more than a tenuous grasp on who its characters are, and it compensates by having them broadcast their every thought and emotion to each other and to the usual suspects: therapists, priests, AA members, and imagined apparitions of loved ones.
The Better Sister is a silly series, loaded not just with ominous ghost dads but questionable red herrings, ill-advised cover songs, and generally tiresome themes. As multiple characters say aloud, Chloe’s “perfect” life was not so perfect after all. Yet nothing quite smothers the acerbic charm of the colorful cast, who will describe a fight as a “real estrogen shitshow” or grumble about being able to see a camel toe from outer space. For all its storytelling sins, The Better Sister handily skirts the most damning one of them all by not being boring.
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