THE BETTER SISTER – Miniseries (2025)

Chloe Taylor (Jessica Biel) is a high-powered magazine editor who returns home one day from a glitzy work event to find her attorney husband, Adam (Corey Stoll), dead in their living room. Shocked by the violent murder, Chloe’s life gets even more complicated when her messy sister, Nicky (Elizabeth Banks), turns up. The kicker? Nicky used to be married to Adam, and the teenage boy, Ethan, living in Chloe’s home, is biologically Nicky’s.

Chloe is a rising media star, which means all the cameras and social media are on her when the news comes out about her husband’s death. Adam is a high-powered attorney with a past of less-than-savoury business dealings, making his killing even more suspicious. Detectives Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) and Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi) first presume the death is connected to their professional lives, especially when Chloe is met with a barrage of online trolling. However, as the authorities dive deeper into Chloe and Adam’s personal lives, it seems that nothing was as glossy as the couple wanted it to appear.

While The Better Sister should be part police procedural and part courtroom drama, it gets weighed down by the sisters’ twisted backstory. The flashbacks to how Adam left one sister for another become frustrating because they distract the audience from the real drama: the murder mystery. The least interesting scenes involve the sisters talking about their shared traumas.

As a murder mystery, the show is highly effective. There is a cast of interesting characters, including a team of mismatched detectives who do not wholly agree with each other’s methods. The writing skips lazy clichés associated with the genre, not forcing viewers to sit through red herrings and police interrogations. Considering the high-profile nature of Chloe and her deceased husband, the case soon becomes a media circus. The trial by media aspect of the case is not explored enough and feels like a wasted opportunity.

In between the current timeline revolving around Adam’s murder are flashbacks to Chloe and Nicky’s childhood, which can sometimes infiltrate the modern timeline as bizarre visions. The sisters have different ways of burying their past; Nicky turned to alcohol while Chloe locked it all away in this icy persona. It’s a well-worn trope of family members from different socioeconomic backgrounds that this series fails to bring anything new to. Netflix’s recent drama Sirenshad a similar central relationship, only executed with much more nuance and intrigue.

And then there is a whole plot involving Adam and Nicky’s son, Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan), who was raised by Chloe. The show wants to talk about toxic masculinity and how bored young boys are being indoctrinated by unpleasant material on the internet. It’s such a big, important topic that it requires more time than The Better Sister has to give it. It’s one of the many big themes the show tries and fails to tackle.

As a family drama, The Better Sister is chaotic. It wants to be a puzzle piece for audiences to put together, yet it comes across as a frantic selection of scenes put together to try to make a cohesive story. This style of writing is much more effective on the page than it is on the screen. Adapted from Alafair Burke’s novel of the same name, the show fails to understand how to bring the sinister tension to the big screen. Cut up into so many side-plots and timelines, the true themes of the show get lost in the fragmentation.

The Better Sister suffers from uneven writing. Olivia Milch (Ocean’s 8) and Regina Corrado (Deadwood) can craft beautiful dialogue between characters and create interesting, lived-in people. Some of the court scenes are highly emotive and well-crafted. But then the show dives into horribly unrealistic melodrama and has the characters do out-of-character actions. The smart revelations of later episodes are undermined by some of the poorer writing choices, even if they are in the minority.

Jessica Biel does a decent job as an ice queen, and it’s refreshing to see a leading lady not be likeable. She’s not exactly a villain, but she is not the soft, maternal type the press wants. She’s toughened up over the years, and the writing does a decent job of revealing exactly why. Elizabeth Banks is less believable as the messy alcoholic with a heart of gold. Her performance fails to capture some of the nuances required for the role, occasionally diving into overacting during the heightened moments of drama. Banks and Biel struggle with chemistry, often because their performances do not entirely feel like they belong in the same show.

The two leading actors are joined by a solid cast who ground the show when it starts to run away from itself. Corey Stoll continues to be one of America’s best character actors, severely underused in the show. Gabriel Soyer and Matthew Modine appear throughout the eight episodes as Adam’s colleagues, while the fabulous Lorraine Toussant is wasted as Chloe’s boss and mentor. A distracting casting choice is Janel Moloney’s role as Chloe and Nancy’s mother, especially when she is only four years older than Banks.

The Better Sister is a pretty enjoyable crime drama wrapped up in a soapy family story about sisters confronting their drama. Separately, the show could have made two decent TV series, but when merged into one, it’s an often chaotic thriller that struggles to pull focus and fails to understand what audiences really care about.

Amazon Prime was smart to release the entire season of The Better Sisterbecause it’s a show that almost requires binge-watching. The pacing struggles to balance all the sub-plots and timelines, and may have failed to maintain viewers if shown on a week-by-week basis. The real twists and turns come later in the season, and it takes an episode or two too long to unravel.

The Better Sister is a glossy yet messy crime drama that tries to balance Chloe’s complicated personal life, her dark past and the violent death of her husband. It drops tantalising hints as to who murdered Adam and why before getting sidetracked by another hundred plots.

USA | 2025 | 8 EPISODES | 16:9 HD | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Olivia Milch, Regina Corrado, Ariel Doctoroff, Brittany Dushame & Laren Stremmel.
directors: Craig Gillespie, Leslie Hope, Azazel Jacobs, Dawn Wilkinson & Stephanie Laing.
starring: Jessica Biel, Elizabeth Banks, Corey Stoll, Maxwell Acee Donovan, Gabriel Sloyer, Kim Dickens, Michael Harney & Bobby Naderi.