‘Bad Sisters’ Creator Sharon Horgan Wanted to Peel Back the ‘Real Story’ of Grace’s Fallout in Season 2 | How I Did It

Note: This story contains spoilers for “Bad Sisters” Season 2. 

After the Garvey sisters successfully eliminated “The Prick” in Season 1, freeing their sister Grace from her controlling, abusive husband, the “Bad Sisters” returned for a season that fans and even director Dearbhla Walsh weren’t sure would come to fruition. 

“Initially I thought, ‘Oh, my God, there isn’t a second series of this,’ because it was so complete,” Walsh said in a new installment of TheWrap’s How I Did It presented by Apple TV+. 

Creator and star Sharon Horgan told TheWrap that as satisfying as it was to end last season on such a high, it was not realistic to the circumstances of victims of domestic abuse. 

“It’s not real life,” Horgan told TheWrap. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought that it really makes sense to show people the real story of what happens when you go through something like that.”

“Once Sharon convinced me that this wouldn’t be the end of our careers, I was definitely on, I’ve been on board since,” Walsh added of the Season 2 extension, with a laugh.

Two years since the conclusion of the Season 1 finale, the Garvey sisters, specifically Grace, attempt to heal from the traumas of their past. Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) married a seemingly nice guy Ian while her sisters remained consistently loyal as she recovers in this new chapter. 

“All the way through Season 1, we watch her coercive husband isolate her from the people who love her, and in this season, she isolates herself,” Horgan said.

“She has all these secrets,” Duff said of her character in this season. “She’s so riddled with shame that she can’t unburden herself. And what that does is it builds this awful wall so she gets lonelier and lonelier.” 

Grace’s pent-up shame and frustration explodes on her sisters, who have been her most consistent supporters, in the second episode of this season. When they attempt to comfort her and discern what’s wrong, Grace pushes them away.

“The whole first season was about saving Grace and protecting Grace, and I think it’s the same in this one. And then I think all of those bad choices the sisters make are kind of from the first season,” Horgan said. “Each of the sisters’ choices is a direct result of The Prick really.”

Creator and executive producer Horgan told TheWrap that the decision to kill Grace off in the same way that the sisters’ own parents lost their lives — in a car crash — was hard but inevitable.

“We wanted that moment to really shock people,” Horgan said. “To lose a beloved character is really difficult. It was really important for it to work that it really felt with Grace’s point of view.”

“There’s this sort of desperately tragic inevitability that she will die alone. It’s so sort of like classical, and there’s this predestination about it,” Duff added. “She just pushes them away from her, her salvation. She pushes away from her. And it’s really sad.”

The third episode of “Bad Sisters” Season 2 will be released on Apple TV+ Wednesday, as the season premieres week to week until Christmas.