Sharon Horgan faced a challenge when she sat down to sketch out Bad Sisters season two, which premieres on Apple TV+ on November 13. The show’s 2022 first season was a heady concoction of mystery, black comedy, and family drama that revolved around the murder of The Prick. That’s what the Garvey sisters called their malevolent brother-in-law, John Paul, who debased his loyal wife Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) and emotionally or physically abused each of her siblings. Now that The Prick was six feet under, what would become of Bad Sisters?

“There was a group catharsis that came from everyone hating on the same piece of shit,” says Horgan, who writes and produces the series as well as starring as eldest sister Eva Garvey. “Especially at that time, with everything that was happening politically in the world, it seemed to just bring everyone together.” Still, Horgan had always thought of the Dublin-based Garvey clan as the heart of the show. So she wasn’t too panicked when Apple TV+ asked her to extend her limited series into an ongoing story. “I think the audience responds to the sisters and their family dynamic—that unique bond and the darkness that they carry.”

Despite the show’s heightened premise and whodunit hijinks, Horgan says she always approached Bad Sisters with a sense of realism: “If these were real women and they found themselves in this situation, how would they behave?” So for the second season, she wanted to explore the fallout from John Paul’s murder, and the secrets pulsing underneath the surface of the sisters’ lives. “You don’t just kill a man and move on,” she says. “In the first season, the collateral damage was way more interesting to me than the actual murder attempts. It was the mess they made along the way, and how it affected them as sisters and as people.” In season two, the question was: “How do you just get on with life?”

Two years later, much has changed for the widow Grace. When the season opens, she is preparing for her wedding to Ian (Owen McDonnell). He is a supportive, gentle man—everything that The Prick was not. Surrounded by sisters Becka (Eve Hewson), Bibi (Sarah Greene), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), and Eva, Grace looks radiant. “What Anne-Marie Duff does in the second season is to take Grace back to that girl she was before John Paul walked into her life,” Horgan says. “You feel like she’s lit up from the inside. She’s very much surrounded by her family, so she feels very protected—but that all starts to fall apart extremely quickly.”

The Garvey sisters are soon plunged into another dramatic maelstrom when a gruesome discovery leads the police back to them, setting off a series of unfortunate, haywire events. “I wanted the first season to impact in more ways than one on the second season,” Horgan says, “because I wanted it not just to be the choices that the sisters make that come back to haunt them, but also the shadow of John Paul and how choices he made continue to trip them up.” A 25-year-old Asian Irish female detective named Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham) is assigned to the case. She is determined to do things properly despite a supervisor, Fergal Loftus (Barry Ward), who dismissively dubs her “a diverse female officer…probably nonbinary by the look of her.” Horgan describes Houlihan as “new school—she wants to do her homework, she’s not about cutting corners, and she’s not in the old boys club.”

Another new character is nosy church lady Angelica (Fiona Shaw). The sister of Roger (Michael Smiley)—who came to Grace’s aid last season and knows her darkest secrets—Angelica is a slippery figure who seems determined to take on John Paul’s role of torturing the Garveys. As with so much in Bad Sisters, she is both sharply funny and potentially poisonous. Although Shaw is a heralded stage actor whose movie and TV roles tend toward the serious, Horgan saw something else in her. “I’ve always found her comedically brilliant, even though I don’t know that she’s done a huge amount of comedy work. In Fleabag, and even in Harry Potter, I just always found her incredibly physically funny. She reminds me of Molly Shannon.”

Angelica popped into Horgan’s head on day one of the writers room, and she knew they had to make use of this character at some point. “Angelica’s got a lot of anger and a lot of bitterness in her,” Horgan says. “We did a lot of work on how she got to that place, and how difficult it would have been for a woman of that generation growing up in Northern Ireland, in a religious household. Her ambitions were possibly put to one side and then she sees these Garvey girls. Why did they have that freedom?”

Angelica is not the only hurdle the sisters need to overcome this time around, though. “What I felt John Paul did in the first season was to unite everyone and give us a big villain,” Horgan says. “In the second season, I kind of wanted to be a bit less clear, for it to get under your skin.”

Getting under our skin is Horgan’s speciality, honed in shows like Catastrophe and Motherland. Grief keeps pace with joyfulness in Bad Sisters, which features a wedding and a funeral. She felt she had something to offer on the subject. Midway through making the season, her father died. “It was an extraordinary thing to go through. The last place I wanted to be was work, but at the same time, it really, really helped me,” Horgan says. “Any storyteller would tell you that when you get to this stage in your life, that is just part of your life, so it becomes part of the stories that you want to tell.”

Personal experience also inspired one of 50-year-old Eva’s storylines this season: her consultation with a menopause coach. (“Is that real?” Angelica hoots when introduced to her. “It sounds makey-uppy!”) “I have one, but she’s not a proper menopause coach,” Horgan admits with a chuckle. “No one really digs into that area too much. And to me, it was important to Eva’s story, and the idea that she’s closed herself off a bit from love. But she’s a woman who’s got some disposable income and, like, why wouldn’t you get someone to help with the sweats and the emotional trauma?”

Learning more about menopause and how it’s altering her body “made a huge difference to my life, so I wanted to pop that in in some way,” she continues. “There’s so much, story-wise, that I wanted to talk about through these sisters. But in a show like this, the thriller is the thing that’s really driving it. And so other stories add color and three dimensions to the characters.”

Much of the pleasure of season one was watching the sisters raucously bond and bicker. To the outside world, they look like “a coven,” as one of the neighbors calls them. Horgan worried they might not have enough group scenes this time around, but they actually ended up needing to pare back some of them. “It’s not like Sex in the City—we’re not all just meeting for brunch all the time!” Instead, the writers leaned into smaller clusters. Bibi and Becka might go off together on a spy mission, or Ursula and Eva will share an emotional moment. Some of the sisters also have love interests to juggle, including Bibi’s wife Nora (Yasmine Akram), Becka’s new boyfriend Joe (Peter Claffey) and her old one, Matt (Daryl McCormack).

The cast has grown very close-knit after spending so much time shooting together in Ireland. According to Horgan, that’s been enhanced by the maternal presence of director and executive producer Dearbhla Walsh. “When we were shooting the wedding, there was pissing rain,” Horgan recalls. “She felt like she had to give us all this sort of pep talk about why the weather wasn’t important, that we all had each other, and how lucky we were to find each other. And we feel like that a lot—that we were really lucky to find each other and get to do this thing. I’m just mad about them! I genuinely miss them when I’m not with them.”