John-Paul Williams is a bad, bad husband. He’s belittling, controlling, physically imposing. He exclusively calls his wife “mammy”, even in front of company. In other words, he has to go. Mercifully, when we first meet him in the new Dublin whodunnit Bad Sisters, he’s already dead – a fact that doesn’t keep John-Paul, played with cultivated smugness by Danish actor Claes Bang, from posthumously threatening to tear his family apart.
The Apple TV+ miniseries from Catastrophe co-creator Sharon Horgan occurs across 10 enthusiastic episodes and two hilariously interwoven timelines – one that precedes JP’s untimely demise and a second that follows from it. In the earlier timeline, JP’s four sisters-in-law plot how to extract their diminished fifth sister Grace, an aching Anne-Marie Duff, from her gaslighting husband. In the second timeline, they scrabble to hide their misdeeds from a couple of pesky suits looking for any excuse not to pay out John-Paul’s life insurance policy.
