The husband of one of the Garvey sisters has died under mysterious circumstances. When the life insurance company investigates, they soon target the deceased’s four sisters-in-law. They had every reason to kill their sister’s controlling, domineering, misogynistic husband. Apple TV+ has Sisters to Death on Friday the 19th, starring screenwriter and actress Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe). On the one hand, the plot follows the consequences of this death and, on the other hand, shows in flashbacks how the sisters conspired to achieve their goal. The viewer knows it was them, but how did it all happen?
With some big little lies, plenty of brotherly love defenses and a good dose of dark humor, Sisters Until Death is based on the Belgian fiction Clan, whose story Horgan adapted and set in the Ireland where she grew up. The series is so complicated to categorize that the question makes the writer and actress laugh. “It’s hard to catalog why I hate this question. It’s a comedy and a drama and a thriller… It’s about a family trying to rescue their sister from an abusive relationship. But it’s also the mess they get into when they try to kill their husband multiple times and fail again and again. But that’s the good thing about it and what I liked about the original. I wanted to push the boundaries a bit because it seemed to me that these sisters would not have an easy time getting out of this, that there would be a lot of collateral damage and they would end up broken by this behavior. I was trying to get into the drama and not just the fun of the assassination attempts. Also, how crossing that boundary changes you as a person,” Horgan says in a video call interview.
Eve Hewson, Sharon Horgan, Anne-Marie Duff, Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene, the five sisters from Sisters to Death.
Finding the right tone was the hardest part for Horgan on a series that was already challenging with hour-long episodes compared to the half-hour comedies she had previously written and with a larger package. “Keeping the tone was very difficult because sometimes it’s pretty silly, sometimes it’s very dark… It wasn’t easy. It’s fortunate that we had a fantastic cast of actors because they had to be very funny and scary at the same time, or very funny and sad in the same scene.”
Like the protagonists of this story, Horgan has four brothers with whom she is very close. “I grew up on some kind of farm in the middle of nowhere. We lived very close to a small town where everyone knew everything about each other. My bonds with my brothers are very strong, I know for a fact and I have confirmed that they would do anything for me and I would not allow anyone to harm them. So it was important to her to set this story in the Ireland she knows from her childhood. “The first images I showed Apple for the series were from places very close to where I was born. If we could make the Garvey house feel very real, the sisters would feel more real too.”
Sarah Greene, Sharon Horgan and Eve Hewson in the tenth episode of “Sisters to Death”.
The protagonists of Sisters to Death are five women who are used to taking care of each other since they were orphaned at a very young age. Horgan plays the older sister, and Anne-Marie Duff, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene and Eve Hewson round out the cast. Horgan and other writers normalized television to portray women’s thousands of faces and even their imperfections. “Television used to be almost entirely written by men, and they wrote women a certain way: mothers or wives, angels or whores… It was more black or white. We don’t care, we want to show how complex it is to be a woman in this world,” defends the screenwriter and executive producer.
Although it was the comedy Catastrophe (2015-2019), which she co-created with Rob Delaney and in which she starred, that won her international acclaim, Sharon Horgan had for years earned recognition as one of today’s innovators become TV comedy. She is also the creator of Divorce, which starred Sarah Jessica Parker on HBO between 2016 and 2019. In 2019 he signed an agreement to create series for Apple TV+.
Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, stars of Catastrophe.
His stories and characters stand out for their honesty and realism, for how easy it is to identify with them. “I find it very difficult to write something that doesn’t seem real, it makes my hair stand on end when I hear something that sounds like a line from a TV show or a line from a movie. I like it when everything sounds like it could actually come out of someone’s mouth. That’s why I always write with a mix of drama and comedy because that’s how I see life. There is never a moment that is pure drama that isn’t real, the comedy is always there. And the characters, not that I base them on myself, but I like to use my own instincts about what I would say or do at any given moment. Many women have approached me and thanked me for it. And once someone thanks you for bringing real women on stage, it’s very hard to back down, you’re letting people down.”
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