“Bad Sisters,” “Welcome to Wrexham,” and Where Dreams Go to Die
Warning: light spoilers ahead for Bad Sisters, and, to some extent, Welcome to Wrexham.
The search for something new, different, scintillating, something you suspect others aren’t watching, can lead you down some unexpected paths. As I’ve written before, COVID brought on a certain amount of cultural saturation, and well, old habits die hard, so the experiment continues: watch a first episode, and if the show seems worthy, stick with it. If not, move on. There’s a lot — and I mean a lot of content out there.
This week in the surprise! department, or this month I should say, is Bad Sisters, a dramedy from Apple TV+; and FX on Hulu’s Welcome to Wrexham, a show about two Hollywood stars who buy a Welsh soccer (football) team. Both are mid-season as of this writing.
On the face of it, the two are nothing alike. Night and day nothing. But when you look closer, similarities arise. They both take place (mainly) in the UK. They’re about loyalty, and what that does to people. They’re about people whose dream of making something of themselves is dying on the vine. Bad Sisters’ Grace is a housewife whose life has been subsumed by a monstrous, overbearing husband. Wrexham, a town that’s seen better days, pins its hopes on a club that can’t seem to make its way out of the National League. Will the characters, or the team in Wrexham’s case, summon the strength and resolve to do something about their plight? Or will the dreams of a family and a town leave them adrift with bitterness and self-pity?
Apple TV’s served up some winners (Severance, Schmigadoon!, and Ted Lasso among them), so it’s no surprise they bankrolled Bad Sisters. The show springs from the fertile mind of Emmy nominee and BAFTA winner Sharon Horgan, the multi-hyphenate best known for her work and performances on the BBC’s Pulling, Channel Four‘s’ Catastrophe, and HBO’s Divorce.
According to the Sisters press release, “the tight-knit Garvey sisters have always looked out for each other. When their brother-in-law winds up dead, his life insurers launch an investigation to prove malicious intent — and set their sights on the sisters, all of whom had ample reason to kill him.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. In addition to Horgan, the ensemble cast includes Anne-Marie Duff (AKA the former Mrs. James McAvoy, also the original Shameless and Macbeth on Broadway), Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene, and Eve Hewson (AKA Bono’s daughter, Nurse Elkins on The Knick) as the Garvey sisters. There’s also Claes Bang (AKA the bad guy from The Northman and Amazon’s The Outlaws), Brian Gleeson (AKA son of Brendan, brother of Domnhall), Daryl McCormack (AKA the sweet-natured sex worker from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), Michael Smiley, Assaad Bouab, and Saise Quinn.
Based on the Dutch-Belgian program Clan, this version is set in Ireland, which makes all the sense in the world. The Irish have a way with mourning, if not death itself. They can’t claim ownership of the concept of sisters banding together to off a terrible relation (see also: King Lear), but they do have a way with black comedy. Horgan and co. lend the show a mordant, wickedly humorous streak, and when it’s not delving into the nastier aspects of human behavior, it’s screamingly funny.
True to form, between the jokes, there’s real pain. Bang is giving what is perhaps the most phenomenally odious performance on TV right now as John Paul (JP) Williams, the husband of Grace (Duff), who keeps his wife mostly under lock and key and chips away at her self-esteem. Grace has become a shuddering husk of her former self, and her sisters are worried. And they’ve got their own reasons to hate JP: Becka, the youngest (Hewson), was promised funds to purchase a massage studio, until JP reneged; Bibi (Greene) sports an eye patch that springs from the car accident that was, for all intents and purposes, JP’s fault; Ursula (Birthistle), a nurse who’s embarked on an affair with her photography teacher, is blackmailed by JP after he hacks her phone and starts receiving Ursula’s sexts; and Eva (Morgan) seems to just hate JP on principle, but there‘s probably more to her story. JP even sets out to wreck the life of the Williams’ kindly neighbor, Roger (Smiley), just for the hell of it.
The show skips back and forth in time, a conceit accomplished by rewinding and fast-forwarding through what appears to be a film strip, showing us the makings of the plot to kill JP as well as the aftermath. If any nits are to be picked, it’s that Horgan and Bang stack the deck so thoroughly against JP you see no reason why he needs to remain on this earth a second longer. Aside from the love he shows for his daughter, Blanaid (Quinn), the guy’s asking for it every second he’s onscreen. Bang’s performance isn’t quite one-dimensional — it takes talent to get an audience to hate a character this much — but there’s no question that JP is, as the sisters refer to him, a prick.
There’s a subplot involving two insurance men, Tom and Matt Claffin (Gleeson and McCormack), secondary at this point though I’ve a feeling it will become more important given Matt’s budding relationship with Becka. Tom’s the one with the hunch that foul play was involved in JP’s demise. Of course he’s correct; the problem is, he’s so damn unlikeable, you don’t want him to succeed, even with a loving, pregnant wife and a looming payout (to the tune of £875,000) that will surely ruin his firm. Determined, Tom peppers the sisters with questions and steals their garbage in an attempt to unearth clues; Matt goes along with it, but the closer he gets to the sisters and learns about JP’s treachery, the less, I suspect, he’ll feel like doing anything about it.
There’s a lot to be learned about loyalty in Welcome to Wrexham, an FX on Hulu program about what happens when two Hollywood stars throw caution to the wind and purchase a football team in a struggling Welsh town. While on its face the idea of an A-lister like Ryan Reynolds and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator and co-star Rob McElhenney buying a soccer team feels like a potentially disastrous gimmick, there’s definitely more to the story.
The reason it works is twofold: (a) the stars actually want to help the team and town and (b) the show knows how to manipulate your emotions. The genesis of the project is unclear (and I’m too afraid of spoilers to do the research), but from what I can tell, the boys had every intention of buying Wrexham, and the show came second. So while there is a touch of exploitation to the endeavor, whatever awkwardness is initially felt quickly gives way to euphoria as they realize the potential their new owners bring.
And the lads definitely bring potential. Wrexham is part of the National League, four levels down from the Premier League (the league in which Liverpool, Man United, Arsenal, and others compete); its fortunes are inexorably bound to the quality of talent the team is able to attract. Because players in the National League make next to nothing, finding decent players isn’t easy, and because of English football rules, teams that don’t make a decent showing are relegated to the league below theirs. Of course, well-performing teams can be promoted to the league above theirs, but Wrexham hasn’t advanced in years. On top of this, their stadium, the Racecourse, is falling apart, and seemingly on the chopping block as greedy developers look to convert the land to condos.
Where the show succeeds, primarily, is its depiction of the fans. To say Wrexham, the football club, is connected to Wrexham, the town, is a huge understatement. The townspeople live, eat, sleep, and breathe football, and no matter what transpires, they’re in it for life. It kills them to see the team lose games, but they never lose hope. There’s the man enduring chemotherapy for colon cancer, determined not to die until Wrexham is promoted. There’s the woman who lost her husband ten years ago, but found friendship, and life, in her fellow fans. There’s the 96 year-old who’s been rooting for Wrexham since the 1930s. There’s his daughter, who becomes emotional whenever she talks about what the team has meant to her family. There are the boys who wait patiently outside the clubhouse after games, begging the goalies for their gloves. And, finally, there’s the tale of Alex Hamilton, the shady owner who was determined to sell both the stadium and the team, resulting in massive protests outside Hamilton’s home in Cheshire, 25 miles away, and Hamilton’s eventual dismissal.
Enter Reynolds and McElhenney, who are determined to renovate the stadium and move the team up through the ranks. As of the latest episode, they’ve achieved the former, but the team is still dwelling in the cellar of the National League, despite a new coach and star player, Paul Mullin. We watch as the two endure Zoom calls with the team’s interim CEO, who details the endless bureaucratic hoops through which they have to leap in order to wrest control of the stadium from the town. You’d think Reynolds and McElhenney would be in Wales by now, sitting in on meetings with the team and its many volunteers. But at this point they’re in L.A., roaming the grounds of their estates, drink in hand, squabbling via FaceTime. The disconnect is jarring, and yet they come through: episode six ends with a stunning computer rendering of the new Racecourse. Progress is being made.
Dreams die easily. We’ve seen that over and over: on TV, in film, politics, sports. You set out to live one life, only to see it evaporate before your eyes. Hope, to quote Dickinson, may be the thing with feathers, but sometimes, holding on to it isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. Grace is going nowhere in Bad Sisters. Her husband abuses her psychologically. Her daughter is ashamed of her. Grace’s one attempt to do something for herself, an Afro-Ceilidh dance class, ends when, wracked with insecurity and self-doubt, she crumples as things gets going. It’s a devastating scene, one of many involving Grace, but it’s what gives Bad Sisters, the show, its motor, and the bad sisters themselves their motive.
The good townsfolk of Wrexham pin their hopes on the new ownership, but it’s anyone’s guess as to how things turn out. Certainly, in the first half of the season, there’s been little to write home about. The dream that their club will be promoted may be headed once again for the dustbin. It’s a terrible thing to watch. I know this as a Boston Red Sox fan who’s seen his team descend slowly into the cellar of the American League East this year. And yet I keep watching. Why? Because I believe they’re going to spring to life and land a wild card slot? No. Because they’re my team, no matter what the outcome. You don’t switch allegiances when all you’ve ever known is love for, and hope for, a single club.
In Bad Sisters and Welcome to Wrexham, loyalty isn’t just an idea. It’s everything, trumping logic, sense, and hope. The will to stay afloat, claw your way up, find a beam of light to follow, is what sustains these people. Even when everything indicates doom is on the horizon, in Thomas’s words, they’ll rage, rage against the dying of the light, and not go gentle into that dark night.
