'The Better Sister' series review: Jessica Biel & Elizabeth Banks bury the hatchet in Prime Video drama

Prime Video

Good sisters, bad sisters, better sisters. Can't wait for worse, best and worst to join the club later. Most of these also happen to have a lust for blood, including The Better Sister, a new miniseries (maybe false advertisement, we come to learn) that adapts the novel of the same name by Alafair Burke. Jessica Biel's character Chloe Taylor has some kind of a fancy job in media and lives a high-end life with her lawyer husband Adam Macintosh (Corey Stoll) and their 15-year-old son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) in New York. But things go sideways real fast when Chloe comes home one night and finds Adam stabbed to death. Ensuing disarray invites the presence of her estranged sister Nicky Macintosh (Elizabeth Banks) who's actually Adam's former partner and Ethan's biological mom, living a much less glitzy life as a former addict.

Detectives Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi) and Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) arrive to investigate and soon find their number one suspect in Ethan. Along the way, both family as well as professional secrets are unearthed and other possible players in Adam's death emerge, including his colleague and friend Jake Rodriguez (Gabriel Sloyer) and their boss Bill Braddock (Matthew Modine).

Since we've turned airport novels and adaptations of those into their own thing already, we ought to start describing a certain kind of storytelling as "wellness and healing retreat novels" based on the amount of schlock it offers. This is essentially what showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado along with their writers' room are doing with this material—this is extremely simple, plot-driven but knowingly junky television, aimed mainly at middle-aged, middle-class women with book clubs and questionable-at-best politics. Every single character has at least 48 skeletons in their closet, the crimes are moderately intriguing, the motives behind them less so, and the style and wardrobes come straight out of mood boards. The series' thematic depth peaks at "domestic abuse is bad, rich people can be evil, everyone is mean towards each other" type of explorations, without ever examining any sort of cause and effect too thoroughly.

While far from the well-made, well-written version of junky TV that the show aspires to be, it is not by any means disastrously put together or performed, even though none of it pops either. The directors (Azazel Jacobs, Craig Gillespie, Dawn Wilkinson, Leslie Hope and Stephanie Laing) come and shoot their coverage, and the visual language is fairly standard stuff. Balancing domestic drama and thriller elements, there aren't any distracting tonal shifts. The acting is sufficient for the most part, Biel and Banks having the meatiest parts but not doing much with them, while Modine is the only performer who manages to change the energy within a scene, which is refreshing seeing how sombre the tone often is.

You can see the twists and character revelations coming from a mile away, but the creatives behind the series aren't able to use them to change the tempo or timbre in a meaningful way so they are neither surprising nor particularly effective. That would be welcome since there's a lot of excess in the show, from a fantastical element featuring dead characters that doesn't work at all to C-, D- and E-plots that don't have much weight behind them. Eight episodes, 45+ minutes each is too much for such mediocre material.

Like with junk food, you can't expect anything nourishing, and that'd be just fine if the story was truly engaging. Sadly, it is not, and most of all, the series doesn't have enough passion behind it. Towards the end, it even poses a threat that the story might continue—with an ending that reeks of something that wasn't on the page originally—despite the fact that it is being billed as a miniseries. But considering how little energy there seems to be, one death should be enough.

Smileys: Matthew Modine

Frowneys: Pacing, runtime

Still waiting for that irresistibly handsome and charming guy the show keeps talking about to show up.

2.5/5

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