REVIEW: ‘The Better Sister’ Starts Normal But Shirks Expectations

Prime Video’s The Better Sister, based on the novel by bestselling author Alafair Burke, is an 8-episode limited series that wraps a family drama in a thrilling wrapper. The series focuses on the pain that drives two sisters apart and ultimately brings them back together.

Created by Olivia Milch, Craig Gillespie, Leslie Hope, Azazel Jacobs, Dawn Wilkinson, and Stephanie Laing serve as directors on The Better Sister, capturing a moment in time and how it snowballs. The Prime Video limited series is written by Ariel Doctoroff as executive story producer, with writing support from Regina Corrado, Brittany Dushame, Lauren Stremmel, and Milch.

The first sister in this story is Chloe (Jessica Biel). A high-profile media executive, Chloe Taylor lives a picturesque life with her handsome lawyer husband Adam (Corey Stoll) and teenage son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) by her side. Her life is perfect, but it’s also something she worked to keep.

Then, there is Chloe’s estranged sister Nicky Macintosh (Elizabeth Banks), who struggles to make ends meet and stay clean. An addict whose claim to motherhood was putting her son in danger, and so much so that he essentially becomes Chloe’s son, Nicky, is struggling. Only, it’s not just staying on the wagon.

The mystery in The Better Sister is as deep as the character relationships we see.

The Better Sister opens with a close-to-boring Episode 1. It sets up Chloe’s life, her family, and the banality of it. Then, she comes home and finds Adam has been brutally murdered. When investigating a murder, always look at home; that’s the approach that Detective Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) takes on the case. Was it a stifled wife? Was he abusive? Was it his son, Ethan, who has drug problems just like his mom? Was it his gilted ex who is also his sister-in-law?

The stage is set with a number of prime subjects, and as they start to arise in the court, it all sends shockwaves through the family. As Chloe’s life begins to be scrutinized beyond belief, Nancy moves in. As Ethan’s guardian, she has to be there, and so this tragedy winds up reuniting the two sisters, but with mommy and daddy issues to unpack, secrets they’ve buried down deep, the sisters try to untangle a complicated family history to discover the truth behind his death.

One of the fascinating elements of The Better Sister is the layers it reveals as the episodes go on. At the start of the limited series, I was all in on team Chloe, both because Jessica Biel’s performance is fantastic and because of her case for keeping her family together and how she views everyone attacking her.

Chloe has done everything right, everything she has had to do, even if she hated it. Still, that success also comes with casualties beneath her, including her sister. As we learn more about Nicky, I couldn’t help but be compelled to look deeper.

Is it Chloe or Nicky? Who is the better sister?

The Better Sister doesn’t come close to showing the audience all of its cards. Still, it captures your attention by routinely making you think you actually have seen them. But with each episode, the hand is discarded, and you’re left questioning things. The series is best entered without much knowledge about the characters or the situation. It consistently involves the courtroom prods for answers, and the family trying just to protect each other.

From a writing perspective, balancing familial tension that comes from a visceral place against a sterilized interrogation on a witness stand is hard. Too much either way can feel like tonal whiplash; however, the acting and dedication to using visual cues and facial movements sell the switch between everything.

But what helps keep dialogue-heavy sequences interesting isn’t just the acting; it’s also how easily the writers have mapped out every lie and secret. Some are malicious, others come from a place of love, but all of them continue to throw the narrative into new and different twists.

For his part in The Better Sister, Corey Stoll remains the king of character roles in a suit. Manipulative and masking his transgressions, Adam isn’t likable. At times, the series paints him as an actual victim, an unassuming man caught in a sisterly spat. Then, it’s clear how much of the sisters’ father is represented in Adam’s choices and acts. While Stoll’s character is killed off at the top of the Limited Series, his shadow is felt consistently.

Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks are the heart of the Limited Series. 

While some may call it overstuffed, tracking the family’s fissures through each episode offers up revelations that thrill. Only the stuffiness comes from not knowing who to root for, and ultimately, not clearly knowing who to call the better sister. But that’s the series’s hook, how it plays with its audience and its characters.

Memory is a fragile thing. We keep and cherish them, but we also don’t truly realize how those around us shape them. As the season continues and we see Chloe’s relationship with her father, we can see that she misses him. Loves him. But when Nicky shares her part in the memory, it all shatters.

Nicky sacrificed her memories, her body, her health, all in an attempt to protect Chloe from the reality that their father was abusive, terrifying, and not a man worth loving. Nicky is an addict because she is coping with the trauma from her childhood, and the only thing that her sister sees is a failure. All of that weight is too much for any one person to carry, but Nicky has to.

Nancy, in this Prime Video Original, is Elizabeth Banks’ best role yet. 

This is the most salient point that The Better Sister makes, playing with its title and shifting your perspective. In fact, The Better Sister begins like a typical murder mystery wrapped in a family drama. The family has hidden their grievances, vulnerabilities, and dysfunction under a thick performance. On the outside, they’re perfect, but behind their doors, their closet is deep with skeletons that keep falling out, pulled out, and hidden as the story unfolds and the cops circle them.

If there is something to critique in the series, it’s that even with its telenovela twists and massive surprises, there is a certain kind of meanness missing from the mystery. While the film does well in extending empathy and unpacking the two vulnerable and broken sisters, there is a gap that I have difficulty quantifying. But maybe it’s how the series’s meanness is continuously neutered just as it begins to stand out.

The Better Sister is a thriller, a family drama, a mystery; it’s just damn good. The reality is that while I wasn’t immediately drawn into the story, I found myself quickly hitting next episode, and soon enough, I had finished it all. The depth of the characters and their thorny relationships keep pulling you in with every subsequent scene. The Better Sister unravels faster than a slow-burn, but not fast enough to gas out. Truthfully, it’s a stunning return for Jessica Biel, and it’s also Elizabeth Banks’ best role. This is prestige television.

The Better Sister is streaming now, exclusively on Prime Video.