Exercises in unlikability

Tragedies present people as better than they are, hence we are moved by their sufferings, said Aristotle; in contrast, comedies present people as worse than they are, hence we can laugh at their sufferings. Two new truly dark comedy series, Bad Sisters and Am I Being Unreasonable?, take this characteristic of comedy to the extreme.

Bad Sisters is the latest vehicle for Irish writer-actor Sharon Horgan, who plays Eve, one of the series' titular sisters along with Becka (Eve Hewson), Bibi (Sarah Greene), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), and Grace (Anne-Marie Duff). A black-comedy-cum-dramatic-thriller, the series centers on the murder of Grace's husband John Paul aka 'JP' (Claes Bang), non-affectionally nicknamed 'the prick' by his sisters-in-law. And boy does he live up to the name: Claes Bang steals the show, immaculately portraying one of the vilest and most off-putting TV characters in recent years.

The series toggles between the present day, as insurance agents Tom (Brian Gleeson) and Matt (Daryl McCormack) investigate JP's death, and the years and months leading up to it. JP, we learn, was a manipulative and sadistic sociopath who was slowly but surely draining his wife Grace of all spirit and dignity, and his sisters-in-law therefore engaged in a conspiracy to murder him. We follow their repeated attempts at taking his life. The series is a masterclass in how to get audiences to root for and find humour in what most of us would normally agree is a serious moral violation: murder.

Comedies like Bad Sisters render misdeeds and human suffering benignly humorous by presenting them to us with psychological distance. An obvious dimension of psychological distance at play here is hypothetical distance: Viewers know they are watching a piece of fiction, and as such they are quicker to condone and find humorous pleasure in a moral violation like murder than they would be in real life. Laughing at onscreen murder is not the same as condoning actual murder, as Quentin Tarantino has exasperated himself countless times trying to explain to journalists in interviews.

However, the dimension of psychological distance most pertinent to Bad Sisters is undoubtedly social distance. In the context of fictional narratives, social distance refers to the extent to which audiences can relate to and sympathise with characters. The first episode immediately establishes that JP is an unsympathetic prick: he commandeers his wife around and calls her 'mammie', he mocks his sister-in-law's inability to have children, and he even uses the bathroom without flushing after himself as a deliberate show of dominance. As the series goes on, we gradually learn just how deeply his villainy goes, and the idea of murdering him seems ever-less morally fraught.

His team of would-be murderesses, however, are also revealed along the way not to be acting from purely selfless motives. Ursula, for instance, is trying to keep JP from revealing the fact that she has been having a year-long affair behind her husband's back. Her own moral dubiousness offers us some leeway to take humorous pleasure in the trouble she and her sisters have in killing JP, even though we still root for them to finally get him.

Bad Sisters' flaws lie not in its comedy but in its drama. Claes Bang's performance cannot save JP from ultimately remaining a flat and cartoonish character. Characters lacking real human depth and complexity are typical for comedies, as they offer the social distance that is conducive to humor. However, it detracts from the series' aspirations towards also working as a dramatic thriller that JP has little to offer besides an amalgam of everything the series' progressive writers hate: sexist, racist, homophobic, controlling, and darkly religious.

Am I Being Unreasonable? offers much rounder portraits of its morally corrupt characters' psyches. Also a combined black comedy and dramatic thriller, written by and starring Daisy May Cooper and Seline Hizli, the series' six episodes are so stock full of plot twists and reveals that it's hard to discuss in depth without spoiling too much.

Here, the prick, it would seem at first, is the main character: Daisy May Cooper plays Nic, a woman secretly grieving the death of the man (David Fynn) she had been having an affair with behind the back of her husband (Dustin Demri-Burns). Beyond being an adulteress, the first episode shows her to be petty, lazy, a habitual liar, and a selfish and absent-minded if still affectionate mother to her disabled child Ollie (Lenny Rush). Straight off the bat, the series in this way gives us license to laugh at the shambles that is her life.

However, as the series goes on, we learn through flashbacks why Nic is the way that she is. Every character around her is similarly revealed to harbour dark secrets and morally questionable traits. This includes the new mom in town Jen (Seline Hizli), whom Nic strikes up a friendship with in the first episode. Even Nic's precocious and immeasurably cute child Ollie may turn out to have a darkly frightening side.

Whereas Bad Sisters is ultimately a morally simple story about a group of fundamentally good sisters going up against a cartoonishly villainous man, Am I Being Unreasonable? derives both its humour and its drama from exploring the villainy in all of us and the circumstances that create our villainy. While a better title for Bad Sisters would have been The Prick, Am I Being Unreasonable? could just as well have been called Am I Being a Prick? In most cases, the answer the series provides to that question is: Yes, but so is everyone else… and for good reason.

Reviewed by Marc Hye-Knudsen, Aarhus University.