Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Better Sister” Episode 8.
“The Better Sister” showrunners took their time crafting their adaptation of Alafair Burke’s best-selling novel — five years to be exact.
The Prime Video series, starring Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel, follows the two estranged sisters’ chaotic reunion after the man they both loved has been murdered. After spending half a decade with these characters, co-showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado said they sometimes brought up elements that even Burke had not thought of.
“We get a little bit more time with these characters in a certain sense,” Milch told TheWrap of the series development process. “There’s a process of discovery that happens when you get to spend time with these characters.”
When Chloe (Biel) finds her partner Adam in a pool of his own blood in their Hamptons house, her life turns upside down. She is forced to reunite with her estranged sister Nicky (Banks), who happens to be Adam’s ex-wife. This messy situation is heightened by the fact that Chloe and her adoptive son Ethan, who is also Nicky’s biological son, are the prime suspects in the murder case.
In order to juggle every moving part, the duo said that grounding them as real people and making them multi-faceted was crucial in helming the screen adaptation.
“The biggest part of adaptation is openness, of course, reverence, and wanting to be faithful to the great material and honor it. But then also freeing yourself of feeling limited, because the world actually expands out,” Milch added.
The whodunit series takes viewers through twists and turns, as Chloe and Nicky attempt to push the blame off of their family unit, and especially off of their teenage son Ethan. In a shocking season finale, the mystery is solved, and the killer is Nicky.
The finale opens with murder scene, as Nicky confronts her ex-lover (Corey Stoll), who not only took her sister from her but also her son. Corrado said that they stripped much of the text out of the scene once they got to set.
“We really pared down. We started off with a lot of heavy dialogue, and then we sat with Corey and Elizabeth and stripped out,” she said. “This is not just a great fight scene. This has to be years of stuff built up on either side, even though they hadn’t seen each other. And I felt like that’s the thing that makes it unique, or makes it work, is that there’s a real history there.”
Both co-creators agreed that letting the history and backstory speak for itself and letting the actors put the decades of history on display was crucial in crafting Nicky’s revenge plot.
They also noted that the choreography of the fight had to be set in stone from Episode 1 when the blood stains, murder weapons and Adam’s body are left as remnants from the treacherous night.
“We wanted to understand how Nicky felt the need to protect her sister, and also from reaching out across time, the need to protect herself,” Milch said. “She knew that getting out was the only way she was ever going to see her sister again. It’s the only way she was ever going to see her son again. And in that moment, all that matters is survival.”
“I think the surprise of the two of them encountering each other at the moment, and all of that coming flooding into that scene, is why you get such amazing performances from the two of them,” she added.
As for Banks and Biel, the leading ladies were more than just actresses on set. The duo have extensive experience in producing in their own rite, and the co-creators said they served as valuable collaborators for the Prime Video series.
“There was no ego,” Milch said. “Their ability to see the project holistically. It wasn’t ever just about their characters. It was about the entire thing and they just know how it works.”
“The Better Sister” is now streaming on Prime Video.
