The closeness between the sisters – mirrored offscreen with a WhatsApp group chat named “season two bad bitches” which Sharon describes as “bratty” – will be tested this season, when they grapple with the aftermath and ripple effect of abuse.
“I wanted it to have a real reason for existing, and not just like one for the money,” Sharon tells me of the new chapter. The conclusion of season one felt pretty tied up, with too beautiful a bow, almost. The Garvey sisters are in the clear, they’re together, they’re swimming somewhere in the Irish sea at peace – with abuse victim Grace feeling empowered and liberated. While Sharon knew the ending was popular, she didn’t feel it was necessarily true to real life.
“In reality, there is an ongoing trauma from being in an abusive relationship like that,” Sharon explains, adding that Anne Marie Duff’s character Grace in particular would have struggled with shame and guilt from the events of season one. She adds that coming to write season two and focussing on the aftermath of Grace’s abuse and John Paul’s death felt “much more up my street” after the shocking black comedy (which she describes as “caper and fun”) of the sisters continued campaign to kill their brother-in-law in season one.
“I really wanted to get into how those women are let down by the police, and by the support networks around them,” Sharon says, explaining how this opens the sisters up to further abuse. “They are targets for the next bad person who wants to take advantage of a vulnerable soul.”
The sisters will also face a huge amount of grief this season (no spoilers, of course), which Sharon explains that many of us will recognise as an “open wound” which in the case of the Bad Sisters women meant that “you’re ripe to be taken for a ride”.
While writing this season, she took a deep dive into the world of abuse (“I got way too heavily into all the podcasts, you know. I mean, obviously the sort of Dirty John type ones”) to do justice to the many survivors who reached out to her after the first season of Bad Sisters aired in 2022.
