When Elizabeth Banks read the script for “The Better Sister,” she loved the role of Nicky, a woman who has fought hard to get sober and must fight even harder to stay that way, but who also wears her working class values loudly and proudly, even if they sometimes manifest as a chip on her shoulder.
“After growing up in Pittsfield, an area filled with working class people, it gives me a great sense of pride to play characters from those communities,” says Banks, whose father was a Vietnam veteran (as is Nicky’s) and factory worker and whose mother worked in a bank. “These are people who endure a lot of hardship, who have to just try to make ends meet. I have empathy for people like that.”
But beyond her role, what drew Banks to this family drama (Prime Video, May 29) mixed with a murder mystery was that the story has an “operatic” sweep. Or, as this classically trained actor (she has an MFA from the American Conservatory Theatre) put it, this story is a fun, sexy whodunit, but it features “two sisters who were both married to the same murdered man and a son stuck in the shadow of his father, so it feels Shakespearean.” Heightening that Shakespearean vibe is the fact that the dead guy, Adam, played by Corey Stoll, appears not only in flashbacks but as an apparition to his loved ones.
That ambition for a murder mystery makes sense given its provenance. While the series is adapted from Alafair Burke’s novel, the show’s creators, who added characters and story lines, hail from that most Shakespearean of dramas, “Deadwood”: Regina Corrado was a staff writer on that acclaimed series, while Olivia Milch is the daughter of that show’s creator, David Milch.
“There’s a quote my pops would often say: ‘When the Dao is lost, men begin to speak of good and evil,’” Olivia Milch says. (That’s Milchian for when the natural harmony of the universe is disrupted by human behavior, we can go to extremes.)
“The true uncharted middle is the stuff of life: You’re trying to be good, but you’re bad and hurt people you love, and you’re desperate to be seen as your truest self and be able to be loved even when you’re a liar and you’re broken,” she continues. “That’s at play for all of our characters at all times.”
The central characters are Nicky, her too perfect sister, Chloe (Jessica Biel), and Adam, whose murder in the opening moments sparks the excavation of one secret after another, and forces the sisters to reconnect for the first time in years.
“When I finished reading the scripts they sent me, I wanted more, because I wanted to keep following this crazy twisty story,” Stoll says, adding that while some series are all about the dialogue, what he loved about “The Better Sister” was that “a lot of the most interesting things happen between the lines, that a lot of it is what’s unsaid.”
In flashbacks we learn that years ago, when Nicky was drinking heavily, Adam took away their baby Ethan (played in the present as a teen by Maxwell Acee Donovan) and took away her sister too, marrying Chloe and moving to New York.
There he became a rags-to-riches attorney working for a sleazy firm headed by Bill Braddock (Matthew Modine), while Chloe became a magazine editor and truth-to-power publishing superstar.
Adam’s image takes a beating as the show goes on. But Stoll says that while he remains “clear-eyed” about his character’s many foibles and failings, he empathized with him because of how “he cares about and identifies with his son — he just does it to a fault so he doesn’t allow his son to be his own person.”
Adam is not a typical villain, nor is he, despite being dead, a typical victim. He’s inflicted more than his fair share of damage on everyone in his family, and Chloe and Nicky gradually earn the audience’s empathy as the series goes on and they slowly and tentatively reconnect.
The lead detective on Adam’s murder, Nancy Guidry (“Deadwood” alum Kim Dickens), has her own past she prefers to keep buried.
“Deirdre O’Connell, who plays Adam’s mother, described all the women on the show as ‘ferocious hustlers,’ which I loved,” Corrado says.
Banks says she was encouraged to play her character as “messy” and strived to add humor (often through sarcasm) to her bitterness. “Nicky’s character is taking the piss out of this world,” Milch adds, “which is part of the ethos of the show — it’s a rarefied world with rich people behaving badly and murder in the Hamptons, but we also wanted to show the class view from the other end, which views all that as b.s.”
The creators doubled down on that by creating story lines for Guidry and her partner Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi) that were not in the novel. Corrado says she learned on “Deadwood” that a good series creates a community that “feels like a living organism” and that fleshing out even the smallest roles is necessary to keep the story grounded and the stakes high.
“I remember sitting with David and we’d be working on a scene with the leads and he would just go to another one with the supporting roles and I’d think, ‘But I was really enjoying that,’” she recalls. “But he taught me to honor every character and the smaller stories, because they hold everything up.”
“It made the producers very happy,” Milch jokes about their dedication to those details on “The Better Sister,” to which Corrado adds, “Do we really need bellhop number two’s backstory?”
Dickens says “some of the phrasing and the melody of the lines” remind her of “Deadwood,” though she’s not someone who offers a steady stream of sardonic commentary in real life: “I don’t have that confidence and swagger.” But she says Milch and Corrado know her sense of humor and incorporated that into Guidry.
While Guidry and Nicky share similar worldviews, they’re instantly wary of each other. “We’re super-obsessed with each other because we mirror each other — we see the other’s damage and it irritates us,” Dickens says, which produces spicy antagonistic banter between the two characters, particularly when they run into each other while Nicky is buying a rug. “That’s one of my favorite scenes. It has so many layers and it’s on the page, but acting with Elizabeth made it a little more electric.”
Guidry is a deeply flawed person and detective, Dickens says, adding: “I tried to carry the weight of her dark past in my boots, and that’s part of her bravado, too.”
But she believes she’s also the “audience surrogate,” calling out the “spoiled” behavior of the wealthy and powerful. “The show doesn’t offer commentary, it just holds up a mirror for all of us,” Dickens says.
This post has been updated to correct the spelling of the character Nicky’s name.
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