SISTERS BEFORE MISTERS

Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks Face Off Over a Murder in ‘The Better Sister’

Everyone is a suspect in “The Better Sister,” Prime Video’s pulpy thriller about estranged sisters caught in the middle of a murder investigation.

There’s a fine melodramatic dilemma at the heart of the limited series The Better Sister:

Adam (Corey Stoll) is married to Nicky (Elizabeth Banks), an unstable addict. When Adam starts to see Nicky as a potential danger to the life of their young son Ethan, he cuts familial ties with her—and eventually Nicky’s more responsible sister Chloe (Jessica Biel) steps in. Years later, Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) is a teenager, having grown up with Chloe as his mother figure. But she hasn’t legally adopted him, so when Adam dies unexpectedly, it’s Nicky, not Chloe, who’s in the position to gain custody.

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That conflict couldn’t necessarily fill eight play-next hours, though. So, what if Adam was murdered? And what if Ethan becomes the police’s primary suspect in the midst of this upheaval?

While The Better Sister doesn’t introduce this development gleefully, exactly, it does seem to relish laying a high-toned mystery over its domestic concerns, with semi-marquee stars squaring off, sniping, emoting, and acting just suspicious enough to work as plausible suspects.

Yet the show, premiering May 29 on Prime Video, doesn’t want to abandon its supposed seriousness, either. Chloe and Nicky’s backstories involve a gradual unveiling of family secrets, half-buried traumas, and concealed motivations over the course of eight episodes. They also unfold alongside a potential corporate conspiracy.

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Some of this is played with the shamelessness of a vacation-read page-turner (complete with the beachy partial setting of Long Island); some of it is treated as more of a modern-gothic psychological study, featuring multiple characters who converse with the dead people who haunt their memories. At a time when prestige television and trashy TV blur together so easily, it’s particularly hard to get a bead on what, exactly, The Better Sister thinks it’s doing. What makes the show entertaining, at least in fits and starts, is also what throws it repeatedly and frustratingly off balance.

Regardless of what co-creators Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado have in mind thematically, there’s obvious intent to showcase a pair of leads with solid careers who never quite became breakout stars on their own. Banks and Biel are both accomplished enough in those careers that it would be easy to picture either performer taking on the uptight Chloe or the harder-living Nicky—which is probably also a sign that they’re well-cast as sisters despite their lack of physical resemblance. Less impressively, they both indulge in laborious overacting here, especially in the first bunch of episodes.

That may be less a problem with the performances than the material that depends so heavily on a strategy of concealment. Because the story is told from multiple points of view—Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan all have substantial scenes and sequences on their own—keeping its secrets mostly involves playing a long game of three-card monte. To prop that up—to serve as a card table, if you will—the many supporting characters tend to behave oddly. A teenage drug-dealer doesn’t bat an eye when Chloe talks to him more like he’s her deadbeat ex than her son’s best friend.

There’s also a sort-of wake for Adam, where almost everyone in attendance speaks with a kind of vague cheerfulness that suggests a slightly bittersweet going-away party or maybe a departed great-grandparent, rather than a man brutally murdered by stabbing.

For that matter, it’s downright baffling to learn early on that Chloe has been widely tipped for a political career, piggybacking off her work as... a higher-up at a popular women’s publication? The show boldly imagines a world where Chloe’s friend/mentor Catherine (Lorraine Toussaint) seems to have amassed Oprah-level wealth and power entirely from an O-like magazine.

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Maybe these more outsized elements are supposed to be satirical; mostly, they make the show feel insulated in the world of TV writing, where self-satisfaction radiates from each perfunctory nod at real-world figures or genuine social issues (police brutality, domestic abuse, corporate evils).

The Better Sister works better as a sardonic poking-around mystery fueled by odd-couple sisters and a chattily antagonistic cop (an always-locked-in Kim Dickens); it leans further in this direction in the back half, while still swerving into less convincing emotional territory.

Milch and Corrado wind up hedging every which way; when in doubt, try a little lampshading and hope that it’ll seem sophisticated and self-aware. Late in the game, a character remarks about one plot turn: “Story like that, though, what do you expect? It’s like a Danielle Steel novel.” Yeah, it is a bit like that—or like an old TV movie-of-the-week with bigger stars and four times the length.

Jesse Hassenger

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