Getting under our skin is Horgan’s speciality, honed in shows like Catastrophe and Motherland. Grief keeps pace with joyfulness in Bad Sisters, which features a wedding and a funeral. She felt she had something to offer on the subject. Midway through making the season, her father died. “It was an extraordinary thing to go through. The last place I wanted to be was work, but at the same time, it really, really helped me,” Horgan says. “Any storyteller would tell you that when you get to this stage in your life, that is just part of your life, so it becomes part of the stories that you want to tell.”
Personal experience also inspired one of 50-year-old Eva’s storylines this season: her consultation with a menopause coach. (“Is that real?” Angelica hoots when introduced to her. “It sounds makey-uppy!”) “I have one, but she’s not a proper menopause coach,” Horgan admits with a chuckle. “No one really digs into that area too much. And to me, it was important to Eva’s story, and the idea that she’s closed herself off a bit from love. But she’s a woman who’s got some disposable income and, like, why wouldn’t you get someone to help with the sweats and the emotional trauma?”
Learning more about menopause and how it’s altering her body “made a huge difference to my life, so I wanted to pop that in in some way,” she continues. “There’s so much, story-wise, that I wanted to talk about through these sisters. But in a show like this, the thriller is the thing that’s really driving it. And so other stories add color and three dimensions to the characters.”
Much of the pleasure of season one was watching the sisters raucously bond and bicker. To the outside world, they look like “a coven,” as one of the neighbors calls them. Horgan worried they might not have enough group scenes this time around, but they actually ended up needing to pare back some of them. “It’s not like Sex in the City—we’re not all just meeting for brunch all the time!” Instead, the writers leaned into smaller clusters. Bibi and Becka might go off together on a spy mission, or Ursula and Eva will share an emotional moment. Some of the sisters also have love interests to juggle, including Biba’s wife Nora (Yasmine Akram), Becka’s new boyfriend Joe (Peter Claffey) and her old one, Matt (Daryl McCormack).
