Bad Sisters is a dark comedy-thriller from Apple TV+ that arrived with little fanfare in 2022 and promptly became one of the most celebrated television series of the decade. Created by Sharon Horgan, who also stars, the series follows the four Garvey sisters in Dublin who conspire to murder their abusive brother-in-law John Paul Williams — a man so comprehensively awful that audiences are cheering for his death before the end of the first episode. The show's masterstroke is its dual-timeline structure, which reveals in the opening minutes that John Paul is dead, then spends ten episodes showing how he might have gotten that way.

The ensemble is uniformly brilliant: Anne-Marie Duff, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene, and Eve Hewson each bring distinctive textures to the Garvey sisters, creating a family unit so believable and warmly drawn that viewers will want to be adopted into it immediately. Claes Bang is magnificently hateable as John Paul, a performance that requires the audience to understand exactly why murder feels justified while also illuminating the specific and insidious ways such men operate within families. The comedic timing across the ensemble is impeccable, arriving in moments you least expect and making the darkness all the more bearable.

What elevates Bad Sisters beyond its clever premise is its profound emotional intelligence about grief, family loyalty, and the way women are conditioned to endure harm rather than name it. The series was renewed for a second season, which expanded the universe while maintaining the tonal balance that made the original so distinctive. Bad Sisters is that rare achievement: a show that is genuinely funny, genuinely suspenseful, and genuinely moving, often within the same scene.