Between all of them they killed him, and he alone died. The association with ‘Big Little Lies’ is pure well-off inertia, but limiting the scope of ‘Sisters to Death’ to little more than this lazy and opportunistic association would be to underestimate this new creation by the British Sharon Horgan, inspired by a previous creation of the Belgian Malin-Sarah Gozin. You may remember Horgan from ‘Catastrophe’, another brilliant series that navigated between drama and comedy with enviable ease and fluidity. ‘Sisters to death’ adds a third genre, the thriller. The series begins with the funeral of “a cocoon”, a real cocoon as we will see, this being the vertex of a choral story that continually jumps back in time to explain what happened before and what happens after. But no, it’s not the typical one in which everything revolves around knowing who killed him: From the first episode we know… well, more or less. Let’s say that what we know is… relative. The first sentence is enough, in what on another occasion could seem like a spoiler and here it is not, don’t worry. Relatively speaking, of course. And it is that ‘Sisters to death’ is more a story about why and how. A truly dramatic story wrapped in a sweet tone of black comedy nuanced by the uncertainty of suspense. It is clear? Almost better than not: Let yourself be surprised by this series that makes the difficult seem easy. That is one of the great virtues of great series: Make it look easy. And making a series like this seems very easy with the manual in hand, since it is still the practical exposition of the theory: A good well-written, well-directed and well-acted story. It’s that easy, and at the same time, that difficult. Especially when the great mystery seems solved from the beginning. It seems. But remember, knowledge is relative. And Horgan plays with it. Very cleverly, and at the same time, very nimbly: ‘Sisters to Death’ works equally well as drama, comedy or thriller. Three in one. The mix, shaken but not stirred, is as stimulating as it is irresistible as it unfolds, chapter by chapter, detail by detail. Because in addition to being easy, it also seems believable in its simple but practical complexity: Although it is a series, it could also be a true story reinterpreted with due bad milk. Something similar to ‘Motherland’, coincidentally, also a Horgan creation. But with a dead man instead of motherhood and sisters instead of other mothers. A series that surprises not through impossible twists or constant hits, but through the finesse, elegance and liveliness with which it displays its multi-genre charm on that fine line of what we are almost sure to be the next step. Of course we know that what we know is… relative.
By Juan Pairet Iglesias
@Wanchopex