‘Bad Sisters’ creator Sharon Horgan on Grace Shocker in the Season 2 premiere

(This story contains major spoilers from Bad sisters season one and the first two episodes of season two)

After the success of the first season of Bad sisters on Apple TV+, creator and star Sharon Horgan had the challenge of coming up with a fresh story.

In the first season, four of the five Garvey sisters plan different ways to kill John Paul (Claes Bang), their sister Grace’s (Anne-Marie Duff) abusive husband, only to have John Paul die at Grace’s hand even. With that villain defeated, Horgan still wanted season two to have the same kind of energy as well as the continued emotional pull for the audience towards the sisters.

“(I) just thought about how to give everyone the same level of entertainment and story and emotion. How to make it feel like the first season, but also feel completely different. To keep that kind of DNA in the show, but do something unexpected,” says Horgan The Hollywood Reporter.

“How can we make it even better?” adds Dearbhla Walsh, executive producer and director of the series.

And so Horgan, who also stars on the show as Eva, the eldest Garvey sister, turned to a story spurred by the fallout from Grace’s actions in Season 1, and the coverup by her sisters and others around them.

“The main thing was dealing emotionally with the fallout of what happened to all those sisters in Season 1 and how they move on from that and and how they get away with it — until they don’t,” Horgan said.

At the start of season two, which picks up in Dublin two years after the events of season one, Grace has some rare moments of joy, including holding her bachelorette party at the racetrack with her sisters, as well as a backyard wedding for her new partner Ian Reilly, played by newcomer Owen McDonnell. Shooting these scenes was also a nice emotional break for Duff.

“Race day was just the best fun when we bet on the winning horse and we go wild. I loved it because I got to be a different Grace. The wedding was also a wonderful couple of days. And we had everything. We had blue skies and hurricanes and it was just classic,” says Duff THR.

In addition to McDonnell, Kitty Eve’s Fiona Shaw joins the series as new character Angelica, sister of Roger, Grace’s former neighbor who helped cover up John Paul’s death. As Angelica, largely unwanted, Shaw intrudes into social situations, cracks jokes, and inserts herself into the Garvey family drama with both a sanctimonious and an elaborative attitude. Shaw was the obvious choice for the role, Horgan says, adding that she and Walsh “courted” her and were incredibly nervous to meet her.

“We all find her funny, but even in things like ‘Harry Potter,’ I always just thought, ‘That’s a very, very funny woman,'” Horgan said. “She reminds me of Molly Shannon, she has such a physicality to her performance. She’s so known for big, heavy stage roles and she can do pretty much anything, but I just always thought she was incredibly funny, I like to lean more into. And it was just so great because she gave us that and more.”

The fun of the first episode quickly turns, Duff notes, when the police visit Grace’s home after discovering the body of John Paul’s father in a suitcase in the lake (a Season 1 death unrelated to the sisters), and suspicions rekindle the circumstances surrounding John Paul’s death. As the pressure mounts, Grace decides to tell Ian that she was responsible for her late husband’s death. Ian disappears shortly after.

“At the beginning of episode one, she’s in such a lovely place, but she admits so early in that episode that the stakes are so high. By episode two, she’s just this hummingbird, isn’t she? And she can’t land. She has nowhere to land. So I felt like that’s the energy to keep. It was much tighter, while in season 1 she’s becoming as invisible as she can be. In this one season, she’s just trying to stay above water,” says Duff.

Grace’s anxiety builds as her sisters also begin to question her recent actions, including her outbursts of anger, and the second episode ends with Grace leaving a panicked voicemail for Eva pleading for help. The episode then cuts to the sound of a car crash, sirens and Blanaid (Saise Quinn), Grace’s daughter, crying in a police car arriving at Eva’s house.

Just as in Season 1, which used time jumps to show John Paul dead in the present, interspersed with flashbacks to the sisters each trying to kill him, Horgan wanted to include time jumps in this season. The first episode opens with the sisters jumping the trunk of a car at night overlooking a cliff before returning to the present, while the second episode features some gaps between Grace’s frantic actions.

The shocking Grace ending after the first two episodes will loom large in season two, with viewers hoping for answers heading into episode three.

“There are many ways to tell a story,” Horgan said. “In the first season, we had jumped between two timelines. So I think all of us creatively wanted to sort of play with time. It’s nice to give an audience something to try to figure out over the course of the season.”

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Bad sisters season two releases new episodes on Wednesdays on Apple TV+.