Bad Sisters season two review – any trace of joy has been obliterated

Sharon Horgan’s follow-up to her stunning revenge comedy is darker – and far less charming for it. The plots are a rambling mess and, despite stellar performances, it all feels morose

Usually, the return of a great TV series is cause for celebration. In the case of Bad Sisters, it’s cause for a fair amount of scepticism – and a sliver of hope. That’s because the Dublin-set whodunnit’s original run – a stunningly engineered split-timeline story of ultimate revenge against an abusive husband (a mesmerisingly monstrous Claes Bang) – was so perfectly self-contained. We knew from the start that John Paul – married to the guileless Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), and the bane of her four sisters’ lives – was dead, but not why. We witnessed Grace’s siblings repeatedly fail to murder the man they’d rechristened The Prick – while, in the present day, Claffin & Sons insurers tried to avoid a pay-out by proving the women had killed him – yet we were kept in the dark about his actual fate until the end, when it was revealed that Grace herself had done the deed. After striking a deal with the Claffins to keep quiet, the series ended euphorically – with a punch of cosmic justice and a sense of hard-won liberation.

Bad Sisters worked exceptionally well as a one-off, both in structural terms and as a fascinatingly idiosyncratic piece of TV, managing to pepper a profound and horrifying study of coercive control with hilarity. Plot-wise, it stuck close to the original 2012 Belgian series – which, tellingly, never attempted a follow-up. Yet for certain streamers, hits are clearly only there to be built on. I was praying that Sharon Horgan – who co-created the show and stars as eldest sister Eva – would manage to magic up a similarly clever storyline for season two. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.