There’s one moment in this episode in particular that I think speaks to a much broader problem with The Better Sister as a whole: a phone call in which Chloe reports Agent Olivero’s misconduct to an FBI complaint hotline. The operator’s dialogue is stiff and wooden. The report, if you can call it that, goes into no details whatsoever beyond saying his behavior was inappropriate and hanging up. This takes place while actor Jessica Biel is behind the wheel of a car, with sunglasses on, effectively making it impossible for her to convey emotion. 

And the entire conversation lasts about 20 seconds. It’s so abrupt, so goofy, like on the level of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie, that I actually laughed. The effort feels so minimal! If The Better Sister had put half the energy into making little scenes like this work that it did into ensuring everyone dresses exclusively in shades of blue-green and orange-brown, it might have been something, well, better.

I reviewed the finale of The Better Sister for Decider. What a turkey!

I miss the days when people on television wore colors. Sure, television is still in color, technically, but on far too many shows that color runs the gamut from Point A to Point A. Everything is blue and orange, apricot and teal, denim and wood, aquamarine shirts and orange skin tones. The fourth season of True Detective Season 4 served as a real Magic Eye poster for this critic in this regard — once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and now I see it everywhere, up to including otherwise brilliant works of art like the second season of Andor. And I’m not crazy — oh no, not I! Watch this episode of The Better Sister and take a drink every time you see a shot with that exact blue-orange palette or a variation thereof. By the end you’ll be drunker than Nicki after getting roofied by her husband Adam.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

There is, however, one genuinely strong scene in this episode, the cold open. In a flashback, we see Adam in a confessional at a Catholic church. Rather than confide his own sins in the priest, however, he enumerates Ethan’s. He sees the boy as a fat, slothful stoner-gamer who’s ungrateful for everything Adam’s worked so hard to provide him with, and he sees his mother, Chloe, as an enabler who keeps throwing bad money after good where the boy is concerned. Corey Stoll is quietly but very frightening in this scene; you can feel how his anger would warp Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan around itself one after the other. 

It takes the priest to point out that he hasn’t actually confessed any sins to be forgiven, but he grants Adam absolution anyway. When Adam asks what for, the priest replies, “You can name it, son.” He can tell this is a man who can’t even admit to himself the things he’s done wrong, but he knows they’re there, and he’ll need to face up to it sooner or later. 

Stoll’s performance makes the scene, but it’s beautifully and moodily lit as well, it deepens the character of Adam, and it even retroactively explains his career as a prosecutor and his current work with the FBI — he was a do-gooder because he’d done bad and wanted to atone for it. In other words, the whole thing makes sense, aesthetically, narratively, emotionally, intellectually. It can be done. I just wish this show did it more often.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

Elsewhere, Paul Sparks is characteristically excellent as Ken, the soft-spoken writer with vaguely Jimmy Buffett styling who runs the AA meeting Nicky rushes to after enjoying some hair of the dog with a man who pretends to be her father in one of the show’s oddest scenes so far, which is saying something. Anyway! I’ve enjoyed Sparks in everything I’ve seen him in since Boardwalk Empire, where he played a memorably chickenshit gangster; watch him carefully here and you’ll see that while what he’s doing isn’t showy, particularly next to Elizabeth Banks’s broad performance as Nicky, he simply never makes an uninteresting choice as a performer. The inflection of a sentence, a glance from the corner of his eye, the way he wears a shirt or holds a cigarette — he feels less like an Interesting Character and more like a character who is interesting, if that makes sense. With this show — with any show, good bad or indifferent — you’ll be a happier viewer if you learn to enjoy the good stuff when you get it, however fleetingly.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

You will watch few performances this year as sleeveless as Jessica Biel’s in The Better Sister. Biel’s character, the allegedly ultra-competent magazine editor Chloe Taylor, spends half the episode swanning around in a heather gray tank top, presenting a physique and a silhouette that look like the work less of a trainer and more of an impressive visual effects workshop. The effect portrays her as both tightly muscled and tightly wound, a woman who ensures her body, face, and hair look spectacular so no one will look too closely.

And you don’t have to take my word for it, either. Over and over in this episode, characters comment on Chloe’s appearance, in ways that can be deemed either effusive or offensive depending on how you feel about the contemporary beauty standards and/or the patriarchy. Her sister Nicky admiringly plays with Chloe’s ultra-neat bob, purring about having wanted to get her hands on that hair since she arrived in New York. Her increasingly estranged mentor/advisor/financial backer Catherine insists on a face-saving memorial get-together for her murdered husband Adam — if only, she says, to make sure Chloe eats. When Chloe envisions a conversation with Adam, he tells her “You look thin,” sounding concerned — until they both grin at how much she always loved it when he’d tell her this.

I think I speak on behalf of everyone with eating-disorder experience when I say, Yeesh! But also, yeah, that tracks: Chloe absolutely would interpret that as a compliment, even if in public she’d likely mouth all the right bromides about body acceptance. It’s very easy to talk about that kind of thing when your body looks like Chloe’s — and the show’s final scene, in which she strips out of her dress for the wake and stands around in black underwear and high heels for a while, makes sure we get an eyeful. 

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

So far, The Better Sister is one of those take-what-you-can-get kind of shows. Biel is an obvious selling point. Corey Stoll playing his umpteenth type-A shitheel — I mean, there’s a reason he gets these kinds of roles, because he’s really good at them. Nicky’s survival instincts, like insisting on a bigger tip-slash-bribe for Arty the doorman, cut right through the character’s clownishness. There are one or two ostentatiously arty shots that don’t really communicate anything but are fun enough to look at. Guidry and Bowen as a sort of arranged work marriage, where she’s older and gay and doesn’t like his personal grooming but they constantly flirt by making fun of one another anyway, is a fun choice for roles we’d otherwise have seen a thousand times. Cut the ancient punchlines, take Nicky out of her Billy Joel baseball tees (which doesn’t make sense anyway, she’s not even from Long Island) and make her a real person instead of a rough sketch, and those individual components may cohere into something memorable.

I reviewed episode three of The Better Sister for Decider.

 Biel is a compelling actor, one of those performers blessed with looks so striking they have to figure out something interesting to do with it lest it swamp their talents. (Think of half the cast of Mad Men, for example.) In Biel’s case, she uses her severe, patrician beauty and gym-toned silhouette to suggest being tightly wound, even brittle. She projects the air of a person whose house of cards is about to come tumbling down just by how she inhabits her wardrobe, her hairstyle, the screen itself. 

This all works particularly well when contrasted with the flashbacks that show her as a looser, less particular version of herself when her relationship with Adam began. And talk about a psychological cocktail there: Chloe and Adam trying to make up for Nicky’s failure by effectively recreating the relationship with a different sister swapped in. But despite this potentially fertile material, there’s simply a limit to what any actor can do with a character who’s less a person and more a contradiction in terms.

I reviewed the second episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

We love watching the ultra-rich suffer. This has always been true to one extent or another, but less than 15 years ago we mostly loved watching the ultra-rich either dress up in science-fiction armor and blast supervillains, or buy Dakota Johnson lingerie for spanking purposes. But the days of Iron Man and 50 Shades of Grey gave way to the time of Succession and The White Lotus some time ago, and the advent of an American government run for the sole purpose of taking money out of your pocket and putting into Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s has only sharpened the viewing public’s metaphorical guillotines. 

Into this heady atmosphere emerges The Better Sister. Adapted by Olivia Milch from the novel by Alafair Burke, it’s the story of an extremely put-together go-getter who’s tied to her good-for-nothing sister by the man they both loved and the child they both share through him, brought back together when that man gets murdered. There’s a lot of potential in the idea. There’s a lot less potential in the execution. 

I’m covering the new Amazon show The Better Sister for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.