The Better Sister

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I just watched The Better Sister and somehow it’s already slipping from my memory. Granted, I’ve had a lot going on lately, and have continued to watch multiple murder mystery dramas, all of which are seemingly in the same vein as this one. Which I think is the issue here. It’s just too much like every other two-white-lady murder shows, where they’re both harboring secrets from everyone and each other. While it’s not Dead to Me, there are certainly similar elements. And, sure, Big Little Lies had three women and not two, but it also exhibited similar themes and situations. Or even Kidman’s next series, The Undoing. It’s all murder, all trials and all plotting and secrets between family and family-adjacent people. And, frankly, it all kind of starts to blur after a while. As if there’s just a pile of these novels that Amazon, Netflix and HBO pick off the pile (which there most definitely is), hire some decent casts and interchangeably adapt for the screen with little interest in differentiation or consideration for the samey-saminess of the landscape.

As you might expect, if you’ve watched TV in the past five years, we start our story with a dead body. Because that’s just what we do. In this case it’s Corey Stoll’s dead body. Ex-husband of Elizabeth Banks’ character, Nicky, and current husband of Jessica Biel’s character, Chloe. Good for you Corey! Issue being, Nicky and Chloe are sisters. Gasp! And you, dear viewer, now get to spend eight episodes deciding who, of the two, is the “better” sister. Because, while Chloe is all professional and put together and, well, Jessica Biel, Nicky is an alcoholic mess who lost custody of her and Stoll’s child, Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan), and has been out of his life since he was a toddler. Thing is, Stoll’s character, Adam, is by all accounts a real dick. And nobody seems particularly sad that he gets murdered. Including his current wife. But only sometimes. Which makes things confusing. I understand that people can have complicated and conflicting feelings about people, but it’s never quite clear how Chloe feels about her stabbed-to-death husband — who used to be her brother-in-law. Even if she’s a prime suspect in his murder. Until she’s not.

At the heart of this whole murder thing is the strained relationship between these two sisters. Both traumatized by their terrible parents, with Chloe, as the younger sister, seemingly being able to overcome that situation and Nicky, as the older sibling, being subsumed by it. It’s a trope, of course, this whole thing. The one sibling shielding her younger sibling from the abuse and horror, while the younger sister suppresses, ignores or willfully dismisses the level of damage inflicted on their damaged, older sibling who absorbed the majority of the blowback. And is a mess as a result. This is that. Add in the complication of the younger sister marrying her sister’s ex-husband and raising her sister’s biological child as her own and you have a pretty fraught situation. Especially when the focus of the murder investigation swings to the son, Ethan, who, it turns out, had a lot of pent-up anger toward his asshole father, who gave him shit about his weight and was generally a crap parent. While this would normally be enough, The Better Sister throws in all sorts of superfluous characters and red herrings to direct your suspicions elsewhere.

It’s these diversions that don’t work. Some of it is the acting. Matthew Modine plays Adam’s weird boss at the law firm. He’s the type who wears ascots and completely perpetuates that old trope of the mysterious, evil gay rich guy. Some of it is the writing, but Modine’s performance feels a little too borrowed from his megalomaniac Papa role on Stranger Things to be taken seriously. But, as off as his performance is — and, frankly, his character as a whole — there is nothing worse than Lorraine Toussaint’s bizarro Oprah character. She is Chloe’s boss/publisher at some magazine I don’t understand, as well as her “mentor” and is played by Toussaint as a completely over-the-top, angry, maybe bi-sexual dog love/hater. I’m not familiar with Toussaint, but her character is completely unnecessary and her performance belonged in a show that was not this one. Like Modine’s character, she seemed to exist only to provide another possible suspect whose power and money could possibly be used to make sure Adam was dead. The third in the overacting, poorly written characters is Kim Dickens’ detective, Nan. She’s weirdly antagonistic to the sisters, going way beyond her professional duty as a cop investigating Adam’s murder. Pissy, bitter and loud-talking, she also happens to be a lesbian. She just feels like one giant stereotype rolled into a poorly written and annoyingly acted package. Dial it back, people.

But, as I said, this show is really about the sisters. Putting aside the oddball casting of the Ethan character — who is clearly not the biological outcome of a Corey Stoll / Elizabeth Banks coupling and whose large size (and actually being 20 and not 16) belies the innocence and sympathy we want to give this supposed 16-year-old child. I’ve always enjoyed Elizabeth Banks, and she plays a good mess here. I don’t love the trope of the alcoholic thing, which just seems to be the go-to in modern storytelling. You know, will they or won’t they fall off the wagon when the pressure and stress gets too high? It always feels like a bit of a copout. But she handles it well, and her character is complicated enough to make it interesting and compelling. The creators can’t resist the seeing-the-ghost-of-the-dead-father thing, but that goofiness is easy enough to dismiss. Biel’s is a much quieter, much sadder performance. Her face is just constantly downcast. She doesn’t get to do funny or ribald like Banks. She kind of acts as a cypher, absorbing the feeling in the room. She has some agency as she tries to protect her nephew/son, but everything about the performance is very controlled and mannered. She’s the Michael Fassbender of this series. You know she was in it, looked great doing it and was decent, but you can’t point to one particular area where she stood out. She just existed to be the hub for all the character spokes.

That all said, The Better Sister can, at times, be entertaining. Predominantly when it’s just Banks and Biel chopping it up. And while it’s not that memorable after the fact, it’s a decent experience while it’s happening. There are definitely some parts that can be ignored or fast-forwarded through (mostly when Modine or Toussaint are on screen) but ultimtely you too can ponder over who is the better sister. Mine rhymes with Bestica Deal, but that’s just my Derek Jeter ex-girlfriend bias showing. I guess.