altereggo123

Bad Sisters is a pretty accurate title, but acknowledging that the sisters are bad doesn't make it okay. They are just too unlikeable to be black comedy heroines.

The show begins with pretty strong misandry. The male corpse shown in the opening scene--with an embarrassing post mortem erection--is clearly shown to be someone who needed killing. (At least it didn't show him with his privates literally on fire, as another anti-male series, Deadloch, did.) As the series unfolds, the other men in Bad Sisters are abusive, unkind, deceitful, dishonest and/or generally jerks. The brother of the obnoxious insurance agent is the only decent guy in the series. He is a person of color which is perhaps why his character is allowed to be okay. (Technically, he's a half-brother or their sibling relationship would make even less sense.)

My biggest complaint is that there isn't enough levity to temper the heavy dose of cruelty in each episode. The show isn't completely morally bankrupt, but it's very nearly there. There are instances of karma (no spoilers), but on the whole, Bad Sisters requires viewers to sympathize with some of the worst sisters ever, simply because there are men who are even worse they are. Not my cup of tea.

This series began as another fish-out-of-water detective story, a big city policewoman assigned to a remote Irish coastal village. There was a note of interest and peril to it--she had hidden reasons for moving there--so I kept watching. It gradually descended to a level of melodrama that belonged in a daytime soap opera.

Apparently Northern Ireland only has about six people in it, and every possible human calamity happens to them, often to more than one of them per episode. The crime or mystery of each episode is usually secondary to whether a couple will stay together or break up.

The acting is terrible, there is no chemistry between any of the couples supposedly involved in romance, and even the sets don't feel real. The characters often stand in them as though they've wandered into an unfamiliar room. I felt like I was watching a local amateur theatrical.

But for the beautiful Irish coastline, I would have given up right away. I stuck through all the episodes of season 1 (!), something I deeply regretted by the time I got to the final, absurd episode of the season.

I'm really surprised it's now in Season 4. I'd like to unwatch at least seven of the ten episodes I viewed.

This series has a great cast, but the first episode made so little sense that it will be hard to slog on. It begins in medias res-people being shot, spies sending urgent messages to one another-but it never pauses to explain who is spying for who or why. We know that one spy, played by Keira Knightley, is spying on her husband, a prominent British politician and possible future MP, and that her recently deceased partner in adultery is also some sort of spook. She has handler and some colleagues, but what are these people trying to accomplish other than pretending to be something they are not?

Ben Whishaw is a gay assassin. We see him picking up a man at a bar for sex but then having to pull away from being on the receiving end of some vigorous gay activity to go and shoot some people. He also spends part of the episode interrupting his assassination activity to have dinner with old friends, a gay couple, and they talk about relationships and the fact that the assassin's old flame has moved on and had a child via a surrogate. And after all these scenes and a fair amount of dialogue, STILL no clarity on what is going on, why people are being shot, or what viewers are supposed to care about. The overall message seems to be: deadly espionage and an LGBTQ+ lifestyle are perfectly compatible. Okay, fine, but what about giving us a decent thriller that makes sense?

More intelligent exposition, clearer plot development, and better writing generally would have really helped this show. What a mess.