Sharon Horgan interview: ‘Bad Sisters’ co-creator

“It’s just walking a bit of a tightrope, really, but I feel like we were sort of doing that throughout because we had to balance comedy with drama — like really silly, stupid comedy with really brutal drama,” explains Sharon Horgan about the challenge of setting the right tone for “Bad Sisters,” the Apple TV+ series she co-created. We talked with Horgan as part of our “Meet the Experts” Writers Guild Award nominees panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

Adapted from a Belgian series, “Bad Sisters” tells the story of the Garvey siblings: Eva (Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene), and Becka (Eve Hewson). Grace’s husband John Paul (Claes Bang) is emotionally abusive, so the other four sisters hatch a plot to save Grace by killing her dastardly spouse. Along the way the show incorporates humor into its deadly-serious premise. “It was the trickiest part of it,” Horgan admits, “and that was just something we had to keep an eye on throughout, in the writing, and then filming, and then in the edit afterwards, just to make sure that we got the balance right.”

The WGA appreciated the show’s difficult tight rope walk so much they nominated it twice, for Best New Series and Best Episodic Drama for the premiere episode, “The Prick.” “It’s the episode that changed the most and the episode that we spent the most time on,” Horgan remembers. “We wanted to make sure that we allow the audience to figure out what was going on, who were all these women, and then kickstart the story of of how they got there.”

The episode also introduced the show’s storytelling format, cutting between the events before and after John Paul’s death: “We had a device that allowed us to go back and forth in time that was incredibly helpful. But even so, it was the biggest thing in the writers room that someone would suggest a story beat and we’d go, ‘No, that’s in the past’ … So it kept tripping us up. But it was a very fun device as well.” We’ll get to see how the story continues to evolve as “Bad Sisters” has been renewed for season two.