Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks couldn’t be better matched as sisters who’ve landed on the opposite ends of easy street. It’s entertaining to watch the women act opposite each other, biting into their succulent roles as siblings in a long-simmering feud. In Prime Video’s “The Better Sister,” airing on May 29th, this pair harbors so many shared secrets they would need a storage unit to contain them.
Over eight twisty, turbulent episodes, past one shocking reveal and over another cliffhanger, all directed by “I, Tonya” filmmaker Craig Gillespie, the audience is invited to guess if one sister is superior to the other. The most successful is Chloe (Biel). The chilly Anna Wintour-ish married magazine editor glides through a glamorous life with a Manhattan penthouse and prime Easthampton real estate. In contrast, Nicky (Banks), the funky eldest and underdog, struggles back in their native Cleveland. The hot mess alcoholic stumbles one day at a time on the edge of poverty, sometimes sober, sometimes not.
“The Better Sister” joins the thriving genre of slow-burn female psychological thrillers like “Big Little Lies” and “Sharp Objects.” The limited series immediately throws a wrench into the tenuous lives both women have constructed. One night after a swanky Hamptons party in her honor, Chloe drives her luxury car home, flings off her high heels, scans the fridge, and then enters the dark living room to admire the perfect view of the swimming pool beyond the picture windows.
Then Chloe slips. She looks down. Gasps. She sees her husband Adam (a charmingly sleazy Corey Stoll), prone. In a moment of shock and horror, she realizes that the sticky goo on her feet, and soon to be dripping from her chic white gown as she kneels beside the attorney’s body to check for a pulse is her partner’s blood. Her life and reputation are about to become as stained as that dress.
As Chloe calls 911, grabs a knife off the floor and runs out front to await the police, we have entered the glossy, as opposed to gritty, modern female-driven whodunit. Without witnesses or an alibi, Chloe, as the wife, becomes the easy prime suspect.
But nothing will be easy as the potential suspects become, like the blood surrounding Adam, an ever-widening pool. Their troubled, hulking, pot-smoking high schooler Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) is nowhere to be found — and had motive and opportunity. Nicky, after years back in Cleveland, suddenly arrives shouldering a bag full of past secrets.
And the potential suspects expand: Adam’s hunky lawyer co-worker, Jake (Gabriel Sloyer), who pines for Chloe. Their imperious boss (a wily Matthew Modine, heavy lifting in a supporting role). And the corporate law firm’s shady Gentry company client whose filthy secrets Adam was harboring, and potentially divulging. Throw in the FBI and the doorman at Chloe’s apartment building, and “The Better Sister” keeps shifting the likeliest suspects, a successful shell game of a murder mystery.
Trying to crack the case, and tarnish the sheen of the high-living Chloe and her entitled cohort, is Detective Nancy Guidry. Kim Dickens nails the part, a salty bag of contradictions with that bloodhound sensibility we love in crime solvers. And the lesbian mother with anger management issues has her own sack of secrets she’d rather not let out, even as she relentlessly pursues revealing the sisters’ dirty laundry.
Despite its familiar tropes, “The Better Sister” is juicy enough to fill eight episodes. It oscillates in time, revealing the early days of Adam’s encountering the sisters in Cleveland and Ethan’s childhood. The narrative also flashes back to the roots of the sisters’ dysfunction. Beneath Chloe’s chill there’s a survivor’s cunning (which may also explain her rise to the peak of Gotham publishing). And under Nicky’s tough exterior, lives a generosity and empathy that persists even as she bears the imprint of their war veteran father’s brutality, and the family’s history of alcoholism and abuse.
The series refracts the ever-shifting relationship of these two very different women joined by shared roots and common DNA. In this way, the story also plays with, and manipulates, the audience’s emotions — who is the better sister? It’s not so clear cut. And while this is a common competition within families, it may be that in the end that question is irrelevant because how can “better” be measured between two siblings. Better in what way, under what conditions and to what degree? How does striving to be the better sister, or being labeled as the lesser, come to define the behavior and self-images of Chloe and Nicky?
Sure, there’s a corpse at the contemporary thriller’s center, and a killer, and a kooky cop. But the fun is in watching Biel and Banks stretch out and strut in complicated roles with ample opportunity to demonstrate their acting chops. What would the series have been like if Banks had played Chloe, and Biel Nicky? The thought is tantalizing, and so is “The Better Sister.”
“The Better Sister” premieres Thursday, May 29, on Prime Video.
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