The Better Sister Goes a Step Beyond
Spoilers follow for the Prime Video miniseries The Better Sister, all eight episodes of which debuted on May 29.
In the recent TV trend of female-focused crime thrillers, the women tend to get away with it — or at least, the series suggests that they should. If trapped in a situation involving domestic abuse, spousal infidelity, or romantic coercion, any action a woman takes can be justified or understood. Crummy husbands or boyfriends are punished, and feminism wins! The Better Sister follows that familiar pattern — at first. But by digging in its heels with a final act that grinds another woman to dust under its designer stilettos, the miniseries goes one step further than its subgenre sisters, improves upon its source material, and lets us luxuriate in the incomparable Kim Dickens being a stone-cold bitch.
From Deadwood to Gone Girl, Sons of Anarchy to Briarpatch, Treme to Friday Night Lights, Dickens has long been a character actor who can, as Billie Eilish would say, hit hard and soft, exuding both soothing gentleness and no-nonsense authority. The woman can wear a cop’s uniform or a sex worker’s lingerie like armor, and her presence tends to give projects a terrene, realistic quality — she’s able to wrestle any character or story line down to the ground. The Better Sister, based on Alafair Burke’s same-named 2019 novel about the relationship between wealthy media mogul Chloe (Jessica Biel) and her recovering-addict, jewelry-designer sister Nicky (Elizabeth Banks), serves those qualities well. As veteran detective Nancy Guidry, Dickens is a woman with a past history of bending the rules and a present-day partner who can’t match her natural instincts. She’s got all the stereotypical qualities of a grizzled old (male) dick, but as Guidry investigates the suspicious Taylor sisters, Dickens gives the character a distinctly feminine bent — in the buttons she knows to push between the women and the familial fault lines regarding their roles as mothers she knows to prod at. It’s a far more nuanced role than the character has in the miniseries’ source material as Jennifer Guidry, and The Better Sister’s new-for-TV final act, which positions Guidry as a puzzle piece for the sisters to knock over, is the most surprising thing about it.
The thriller begins by focusing on Chloe’s seeming perfection: She’s the glamorous, gorgeous editor-in-chief of a shit-stirring women’s magazine who regularly speaks publicly about what’s wrong with men these days; her approach to empowerment is as razor-sharp as her cunty bob. Of course, not all is as it seems — especially not when Chloe’s high-powered-lawyer husband Adam (Corey Stoll) ends up stabbed to death on the floor of their beach house in the Hamptons — but The Better Sister is judicious in parceling out the reality of Chloe’s life. Each episode includes a big bang of truth, a reveal that disrupts not just Chloe’s flawless façade but also pierces her own sense of self and keeps viewers guessing about what’s coming next.
Chloe’s son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) is her stepson, and then, in one of those reveals, is actually her biological nephew, because Adam was first married to Nicky. Her estranged relationship with Nicky was messy first because Chloe ignored their father’s abuse of Nicky in their childhood, then messier because she lied to her family about her growing relationship with Adam. As for her close friendship with Adam’s co-worker Jake (Gabriel Sloyer), well, you can probably guess what the truth is there! As The Better Sister peels away Chloe’s layers of artifice and reunites her and Nicky, experienced investigator Guidry and her new partner, Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi), become more wary of the pair and their individual problems with Adam. But the evidence points to Ethan, and so they arrest and charge him with his father’s murder, pushing the once-estranged sisters even closer as they work to defend the young man they both consider their son.
Co-showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado dole all this out with the typical tools of the genre — trauma flashbacks, ghostly figures from the past, casually divulged betrayals — and most of that is lifted from Burke’s book. (Olivia is the daughter of Deadwood creator David Milch, and her working here with Dickens and Corrado, both alums of her father’s series, is a nice full-circle moment.) There’s a thinness to the novel, though, which prioritizes Chloe’s first-person point of view and keeps the investigation into Adam’s death largely in the margins. To round out the story and make it worthy of eight hour-long episodes, Milch, Corrado, and their creative team (including director Craig Gillespie, patron saint of troubled and troublesome women in United States of Tara, I, Tonya, and Pam & Tommy) bulk up the narrative through character. Banks gets to humanize Nicky with a love interest played by Paul Sparks (always welcome) and a support-group subplot; the FBI is portrayed as snarlingly villainous (also always welcome) as they bully Chloe into providing them with confidential information about Adam’s work with a shadowy real-estate developer. No scene is safe from either Lorraine Toussaint, gliding around gracefully as Chloe’s deliciously opportunistic publisher and mentor Catherine, or Michael Harney (another Deadwood alum!) as Arty, Chloe’s gravelly voiced, secretly covetous doorman.
But most engaging of all is Dickens as Guidry. In Burke’s book, Guidry is an efficient cop and a boring character. She zeroes in on Ethan because of tension between him and Adam, dislikes her predictably misogynist partner Bowen, and then decides she was wrong about Ethan’s guilt once she discovers that Adam was cooperating with the FBI and his law firm was beginning to nose around. Because of that, she can’t be sure that someone affiliated with Adam’s job didn’t kill him, and there’s no physical evidence linking Ethan to the crime, anyway. In a chapter from Guidry’s perspective, Burke writes, “Maybe that kid never would have been arrested if she had seen the full picture to begin with. If she were on that jury, she knew how she’d vote,” and her final act is accepting from Chloe some of Adam’s hidden files. In reality, Nicky killed Adam for abusing Chloe, as he did her when they were married, and Chloe is helping cover up her sister’s act by framing Adam’s boss Bill Braddock for his murder. Guidry falls for the bait, Bill is arrested, and the detective ends the story as the sisters’ flatly ethical pawn.
You don’t cast Dickens for a role that one-dimensional, though, and in the series, she’s far more complicated. More directly: She’s a real jerk, but Dickens is so breezily confident in that characterization, you have to admire her for it. Guidry’s boss is wary of her pattern of “bulldozing through” cases and pushing victims around, warnings that Guidry basically rolls her eyes at, even as she’s forced to take a psychiatric evaluation to stay on the job. And in a fascinating monologue that Dickens delivers with just enough ambiguity to make you wonder whether any cop can actually be a good person, Guidry reveals that years before, she mistook a Black man for a suspect they were chasing, cornered him in an alley, got the crap beaten out of her, and then participated in attacking him when her fellow officers caught up with them. He wasn’t the pedophile they were looking for after all, and now he’s paralyzed and living in a care facility, with Guidry visiting him every so often as a kind of penance. Even this scene is murky, with Guidry calling him an “asshole” for nearly killing her, describing herself as a “cunt” for her brutality toward him, and then offering to pay for his much-needed dental care, all actions that Dickens plays with bristling defensiveness.
In another version of this show, Guidry would realize that her trauma makes her more like the Taylor sisters than she knows, and she’d think of them as women aligned together against men, with gender camaraderie outweighing all other differences. No such thing occurs in The Better Sister. In a conclusion different from the book, two things happen concurrently in finale episode “They’re in Their World”: Guidry realizes that Nicky killed Adam and left her cell phone behind in Ohio as a premeditated alibi for herself, and Nicky learns that Guidry “beat the shit out of the wrong fucking Black guy, and they covered it up.” By the time Guidry gets back to New York with the evidence to haul Nicky in, Nicky and Catherine have leaked Guidry’s misdeeds, ruining her reputation and getting her put on seemingly indefinite leave. Unlike in the book, she doesn’t fall for Chloe’s framing of Bill and end the story confident in her own morality. Instead, Guidry’s last scene is in a bar, as she watches her gullible partner Bowen arrest Bill as a person of interest in Adam’s murder and “multiple ongoing investigations” on a news report. Now Bowen gets to be the cop convinced of his own righteousness, and Guidry is irrelevant.
Earlier in the series, during her psych evaluation, Nan said, “I don’t want to fuck up again,” but in The Better Sister, some fuckups are easier to forgive or forget than others. Nicky murdering Adam can slide. Chloe’s infidelity and lying about Nicky’s addiction to take Ethan from her years ago is forgiven. Ethan harassing Chloe online was just boys being boys, and him leaving his bleeding-out father to die was him protecting his mothers. The position of power that Guidry abused, though, makes her actions unconscionable, and the Taylor sisters dragging another woman down so they can absolve each other of their own sins is a welcome shake-up from this genre’s usually placid feminism. The bitterness with which the drinking, TV-watching Guidry says of Bowen, “Good for you, getting it all wrong — idiot,” is resigned, almost sardonic. It’s the character at her most low, and it’s The Better Sister at its storytelling high.
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