“I’m the kind of person who’ll always wait until the end of a story, then ask: ‘But what happened next?’” says Sharon Horgan. Horgan had just written Bad Sisters – the brilliant Apple+ series about an abusive husband and the five Irish sisters who come together to cover up his murder – when she felt the itch to know more.
“It was so neatly tied up,” she says of the first series, which aired in 2022, “but in real life, big events have serious fallout. So I started asking all the questions I’d ask if this had actually happened.” So while natural justice appeared to have been served when Anne-Marie Duff’s long-suffering Grace had eliminated her abuser – a man her sisters had nicknamed The Prick – Horgan still had questions about “how the very different Garvey sisters would move on from something like that. How would their individual consciences cope? And of course we know they weren’t the only ones who knew something untoward had happened…”
Horgan wasn’t alone in wanting to spend more time in the company of the deliciously acerbic Garvey sisters. Viewers were equally keen to follow the lives of Grace, Eva (Horgan), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson). At the beginning of season two, we find Grace in a new relationship, with a considerate, loving man who appears to be the opposite of The Prick.
“By the end of season one, Grace was almost broken,” says Horgan. “Even though her sisters tried to prevent some of the damage caused by the abuse, a lot of that was already done. And, the thing is, women who’ve been through something like that often find themselves drawn to similarly abusive men over and over again. Those patterns repeat. Those men have a radar for her kind of vulnerability. So, while you really want this to be the end of the f**king damage for Grace, how could it be?”
Talking over video call in a crisply ironed shirt, the multi Bafta-winning Irish creator/star of edgy, era-defining sitcoms including Pulling, Catastrophe and Motherland is glossy but distracted. On screen she often has a sardonic, cool-jawed snap to her comic delivery, and I feel that today in the way she narrows her eyes and refines my questions. Twisting this way and that on her swivel chair, she has to mute our call when messages ping into her phone, and appears to flick through her emails as we chat, proving herself a premier league multitasker.
At 54, Horgan is five years older than me, but I’m impressed by her ability to keep so many balls spinning expertly through the air, while I’m feeling that perimenopause has seen me struggling to maintain the work/life juggling skills at which I excelled for the past two decades. Her character, Eva, on Bad Sisters has employed a “menopause coach” to help her through the hormonal transition, causing vicious nosy neighbour Angelica (played by Fiona Shaw) to scoff: “Is that real? It sounds makey-uppy…”
Horgan didn’t have a menopause coach, “which was a job title I looked up and found out existed”, but she did have “a menopause expert that I worked with to figure out what I needed”.
A few years ago, the divorced mother of two had found herself struggling with classic menopause symptoms. “I was devoid of energy, not sleeping, you know, the usual! I also had a frozen f**king shoulder” – a condition that is common for a woman of Horgan’s age – “for about three years and no idea when I would be able to get it treated… It went away the minute I got my hormones.” Like many women, she lists the pile-up of issues along with the sudden loss of efficiency required to manage them.
“Usually people make a change when they get to that point in life, don’t they?” says Horgan. In her case, she changed GPs and decided: “stop drinking, get fit, sort your hormones out”. I’ve read she started jogging? “I don’t call it jogging – I call it running. I’ve been doing that for years but I pushed it up to two or three times a week a couple of years ago. I will go through phases of not doing it, but I generally feel better when I get out and do it.”
Horgan always creates a new running playlist for each series she writes. For Bad Sisters, she picked songs by women not afraid to make their own gloriously challenging noises: Sinead O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan, Kate Bush and PJ Harvey. These are also women who famously sang about subjects other than men. The thought leads us on to whether Bad Sisters would pass the famous feminist Bechdel Test – devised back in 1985, to pass the test a film needed women to have a certain percentage of lines that were not about men. “Good point!” mulls Horgan. “But does it still count if the women are discussing how to kill the man? Instead of how to win his heart?”
A self-defined “hustler” who’s previously pointed out that it helps that “if you grew up on a turkey farm you don’t expect a life in the media to work out”, Horgan was already 36 when Pulling, a sitcom about three single women sharing a flat in London and scrambling their way through the chaotic pre-app dating scene, hit British TV screens. Born in Hackney, east London in 1970, she was two years old when her parents whisked her out of the metropolis to raise her amid the poultry of County Meath. There she and her two brothers and two sisters watched their father struggle with a life he didn’t enjoy and all planned to make a break from the world of festive bird slaughter.
Horgan studied English and American literature in London and met her future Pulling co-writer Dennis Kelly working in Youth Theatre. This was a time at which many aspiring female comedy writers felt themselves alone in writing rooms. “I remember places like those BBC Radio 4 writers rooms being incredibly intimidating for a woman,” she recalls.
While pitching Pulling, she remembers feeling that weird cocktail of “being sort of marginalised but also kind of guilty because I had quite an easy time of it. I came along at a time when there was a certain space for a woman and I just took that up. It probably meant a bunch of other women didn’t get their shows made because ‘female comedy’ was a niche thing.”
Aired in the wake of the slick, stylish American show Sex and The City, Pulling offered female viewers of the same age characters whose scrapes they could identify with, rather than lifestyles they were expected to aspire to. This was a philosophy Horgan stuck with when it came to creating parenting comedy Motherland with Graham Linehan (The IT Crowd) and Holly Walsh (Dead Boss). The show made hay with the mucky compromises of women juggling kids, careers, friendships and marriages. Women who had previously gazed at the cast of Sex and The City and filled in online quizzes to work out whether they were Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda or Samantha now found themselves at post-PTA drinks pronouncing themselves Julia (working, married mum) Liz (sarcastic single mum), Amanda (perfectly turned out head of the PTA) or Anne (shy, perma-pregnant people pleaser). “I remember people talking about it as Sex and The City – with kebabs,” grins Horgan.
Horgan, who married businessman Jeremy Rainbird in 2005 and had two children with him before the couple divorced in 2019, is curious about how women judge each other. Her sister Maria just produced a documentary about the Irish Housewife of the Year (2024) – a competition that saw Ireland’s homemakers pitted against each other (for their culinary skills, physical appearances and community commitments) to win “a new oven and tidy cash prize”. Horgan rolls her eyes over the fact the show ran from 1967 until 1995 – “ridiculously recent!” But she has channelled some of that show’s fierce female rivalry in the Bad Sisters character of Angelica.
Played with hilariously brutal toxicity by Fiona Shaw, Angelica is a woman who grew up in Northern Ireland before the culture relaxed. “She has played by all the social rules for women of her age,” says Horgan, “so it f**king riles her to see the Garvey sisters enjoying a freedom she doesn’t even understand. There are whole layers of anger and loneliness for women like that.”
Women’s judgement of their sisters also feeds into Horgan’s upcoming role as Amanda Knox’s mother, Edda Mellas, in the Hulu true-crime miniseries Amanda. The drama looks back at the way the American student was depicted in the media when she was wrongly jailed in Italy for the 2007 murder of her flatmate, Meredith Kercher. “It was so vile and sexist, the way she [Amanda Knox] was demonised for her looks, for owning a vibrator,” says Horgan. Because any woman who wants orgasms must be evil, right? She nods and makes a face. “Yeah.” That sarky eyebrow almost hits her hairline. “Urgh. Right!”
Although true crime is proving a morally dicey area, Horgan admits she has always “allowed myself to watch it, to listen to it”. While working on Bad Sisters and Amanda, she says she’s been able to justify the habit “as research – I thought I needed to understand the language of crime and how we think about it”. But after a six-month immersion in the genre – “watching it with my teenage daughter” – she realised she needed to go cold turkey. “As women we justify consuming this stuff as a way to be prepared, to know where the dangers are,” she sighs. “But in the end you realise it’s just not a healthy thing to ingest on that level.”
As Horgan prepares to twist her swivel chair back toward the screen on which she’s writing Amandaland, the sequel to Motherland starring Lucy Punch as the Stepford-style mum, Horgan admits she was the kind of mum who “never joined the PTA”. But she was always fascinated by the mums who managed to arrive at the school gates immaculately groomed in their shiny cars. She was curious to see “what must lie beneath that sheen of hairdressers appointments”.
Did she ever ask? “No! I always just lurked in the school WhatsApp groups like a weirdo with my finger constantly poised over the ‘leave group’ button but realising that might look too passive-aggressive.” You can leave without anybody noticing now, I tell her, and she laughs. “Typical.”
The final episode of ‘Bad Sisters’ season two is on Apple TV+ on Monday
