The Better Sister Showrunners Unpack Ending, Characters’ Secrets

[This story contains spoilers from all eight episodes of Prime Video’s The Better Sister.]

When crafting Prime Video’s eight-episode limited series The Better Sister, starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado asked themselves, “What is the most uncomfortable path we can take and can we bear telling it this way?”

That path proves to be a spiderweb of mysteries as Milch and Corrado explore both the unraveling of a whodunit and the trauma and history between two estranged sisters Nicky (Banks) and Chloe (Biel). Adapted from Alafair Burke’s novel of the same name, Biel and Banks star as sisters seemingly living opposite lives — Chloe with an established career and devoted family that includes lawyer husband Adam (Corey Stoll) and teenage son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan), while Nicky struggles to stay clean. However, when Adam is murdered, the two sisters must come together, especially when Ethan is accused of the murder. To make matters more complicated, Nicky is also Adam’s ex and Ethan’s biological mother.

When exploring the lingering secrets and complex family and personal history that exist for Chloe and Nicky, Milch tells The Hollywood Reporter that they were really exploring “the emotional and psychological unraveling” of each character.

“I think so much of the show is about the stories that we’ve told ourselves about who we are, about who our siblings are, and about what happened,” Milch says, adding, “As you get to know the characters, you start to understand more and you start to understand how they didn’t understand each other at a certain point, how they sort of moved away from each other.”

Throughout the series, the audience watches Biel’s Chloe and Banks’ Nicky fight to save their son from jail while also having to confront their own demons whether personally or ones that spurred from each other and their parents. As for who is actually the “better sister”? That was a “real guiding light” for the show, Milch says, adding, “All of us are trying to sort of be better than our worst selves, and we don’t always succeed. These two sisters think things about each other. The world thinks things about them. And, at different moments, one of them is trying to do the right thing, and one of them has made a mistake, and yet they sort of keep finding each other.”

Corrado says, “I think they ultimately have have destroyed the trust between them, and there is this slow rebuilding. But the question remains, can they actually move on from these things that they’ve done to each other, which are very deep and unforgivable in some ways? Can we forgive, but can I live with you and move forward?”

Ahead of the show’s premiere, Milch and Corrado chatted with THR about show’s spiderweb of mysteries, exploring a complex yet “perfect alcoholic family” and break down that killer reveal ending — and the new mysteries to explore.

How did this project come to you both and what about the story made you want to be a part of it?

OLIVIA MILCH Tomorrow Studios, the amazing producers on the project, had sent the book to me in 2019. It’s so twisty and turny and fun, and Alafair [Burke] does such an incredible job. Then her prosecutorial background and how well researched all of the trial stuff was, it was just such a fun read.

I think for me personally, the thing that I really connected to is this notion that siblings get different versions of their parents, particularly when a parent gets sober, and how that affects one kid getting a sober version of the parent and one kid having experienced a parent when they were in more of an addict or in use. I really connected with that. My dad got sober when I was 10, and my brother was 13, my sister was 15, so I really felt like, “Oh, I understand that.” And even if you don’t have experience with sobriety, everybody, I think can understand that their parents change as people and you are getting them at different stages of their life. As you become an adult, and you look back, you realize, “Wow, that had such an effect on who I am, and who my siblings are, and also the way that I think of my siblings and the stories that I tell.”

Then the idea of getting to work with Regina. Regina is like on the Mount Rushmore of writers to me. Tomorrow Studios was so committed to the project throughout all of these years and just so believed in it. So we’re very much indebted to them and grateful to them for helping us see it through, and now we got to make it, which is just crazy!

REGINA CORRADO I have a very big family. Each one of us has a different version of the sobriety. My favorite is, “He wasn’t sober.” (Laughs.) You think you had one version of, “Oh, no, he kicked it.” Everyone’s got the real scoop. That’s my favorite piece of it. So we connect a lot on the family aspect of this, which is really fun to explore and continue to explore, because the exploration doesn’t end.

This series is presented as a spiderweb of mysteries where we have the central mystery of Adam’s death but also other mysteries including of the sisters themselves, Adam as a person and his job, Ethan’s secrets and the detective and her past. And once you think you know something, something else happens to steer you in another direction. Going into this, how did you go about crafting how you were going to explore these different mysteries and present the varied pieces of this overall puzzle we watch throughout the series?

MILCH All the characters have a secret pride and a secret shame. At the heart of a lot of the mysteries in the show, which you’ve done such a beautiful job elucidating how you think you know you’re solving one thing and then another thing, is a lot of these characters have secret shame and [exploring] to be seen and to be known once your secret shame is revealed. And to ask, can I still love myself? Can other people still love me? All the characters are asking that of each other at different times. So I think so much of the plot is the emotional and psychological unraveling [and] our exposure of the characters to each other. And the web that you talk about is understanding that they’re all in it together and their fates are really intertwined, which is the truth of all of us. We spent so much time thinking about the past and the care of each character that having gotten to know them so well, and then getting to understand the actors and what they were bringing to the characters as we approached every moment of revelation, we understood what that might give us access to in the past, the character, and how that might then come to light in that present moment. That was a lot of fun.

CORRADO I think also the shame that one thinks is going to do you in, sometimes has that surprising liberation attached to it. I think that was a theme Olivia and I were very interested in exploring and talking about is that we carry this darkness around, and then when you finally expose [it], whether voluntarily or not, there is a freedom to live in a different way. And we can say that that that applies to every single one of our characters too.

The narrative centers on these unreliable narrators, given it doesn’t seem like anyone is really trustworthy and there are lingering secrets with everyone involved. Can you talk about creating Chloe and Nicky and the conversations you had with Jessica and Elizabeth in who you wanted them to be?

CORRADO I think that they are both very different in their process, both incredibly smart and invested in layering and I think sobriety, particularly for the Nicky character. It’s complicated. And it’s also complicated for how old they are. I think the conversation was always, how do we make them more interesting and the more courageous choice as writers and as actors? What is the most uncomfortable path we can take and can we bear telling it this way? And I think that they were both very committed to that. I think Elizabeth and Jessica were just delightful to get into it with, because they always showed up on set with something that they had been grappling with. It wasn’t like they came in and they were like, “I got it.” They were like, “Well, what about this? I have this question.” It’s hard work, because when you’re honest about it, it’s uncomfortable.

MILCH There was so much mutual vulnerability that was being brought to the process, and that’s what makes it messy in the best way, because it makes it human. I think part of what you were pointing out with the web of all of these characters is that nothing is clean. The unreliable narrator, you’re never 100 percent honest with yourself, let alone other people. Both Elizabeth and Jessica, they’re so smart, and they’re such pros. They’ve been doing it for so long that I think there was so much excitement and they were so down to go to that place of vulnerability. They weren’t afraid of the moments of messiness in the characters. That excited them the most. That’s the best you can ask for with creative collaborators.

We spend a lot of the show taking the time to understand these characters and their choices and peel back their layers. I think it humanized them because you may at first not have sympathy or even know whether you like them based on what we think we know about them.

CORRADO But you hope that those two things can exist at the same time. Your heart is big enough that you feel for them. That’s the trick of it: to be unlikable in some instances and moments and then all of a sudden break somebody’s heart when they’re watching you suffer.

You also explore Nicky and Chloe’s childhood and upbringing and how the both of them had different experiences, especially given their difference in age. Can you talk about how their childhood shaped how they conceived themselves and each other and what you wanted to get across with their backstory?

MILCH I think all of us are products of our mother and father, or lack thereof, and our childhoods. It was so important to us, particularly with the sisters, to go back to those original wounds and those original traumas. I think so much of the show is about the stories that we’ve told ourselves about who we are, about who our siblings are and about what happened. It was really important for us to be able to start interrogating some of those memories and charting the course of our characters, also tapping back into them and understanding them in a different way. I think that happens for a lot of us. I think it’s so potent and so powerful to just even see those glimmers and those moments of childhood, because it makes you understand that inside of us we all have the kid version of ourselves still. Getting to access that rawness and that pain directly is so important for our characters and then so important for our audience. We know there’s volumes of story about our characters before we met them. So that was something that was so special for us to be able to do. And I think really starts to complete the picture. As you get to know the characters, you start to understand more and you start to understand how they didn’t understand each other at a certain point, how they sort of moved away from each other.

CORRADO I feel like to meet their parents it all becomes abundantly clear what happens: It’s the perfect alcoholic family (Laughs.)

As Chloe and Nicky work together to protect Ethan, their bond grows, but it is a slow progress and almost felt like their relationship was strongest when there were secrets. Can you talk about the progression of their relationship and the complexities of that sibling relationship?

CORRADO I think it’s a push and pull, like five steps forward, six steps back. I think they ultimately have have destroyed the trust between them, and there is this slow rebuilding. But the question remains, can they actually move on from these things that they’ve done to each other, which are very deep and unforgivable in some ways? Can we forgive, but can I live with you and move forward?

MILCH Or how do you embrace the totality of a person, including that that person was capable of hurting you and harming you in that way? Can you hold the truth simultaneously, that they can love you and that they can hurt you so much? That’s really family, right? I think when you’re with your siblings, you revert back to being kids immediately, and you have all of the stuff that’s happened between you in the present. And so I think that Jess and Elizabeth do such an amazing job of getting at that dynamic where there’s so much distrust, so many secrets between them, and yet, the second they get with each other, it’s the bickering, and it just comes out. We always talk about the moment on the terrace when Guidry, the cop [played by Kim Dickens], comes out, [and they’re like], “She’s such a bitch!” Siblings unite talking shit about an outsider. So I think that was also very important to us to find those moments of humor and levity and the dynamic that is unique to sisters.

Adam may have been murdered but he’s very much a central character. We learn he went with Nicky’s sister, is abusive and involved in a shady business. How did you view Adam and the motivations he had with the choices he made when it came to Nicky and Chloe, Ethan and then his career?

MILCH Adam also was always so important to us — not necessarily that there were redeeming qualities about him but that we understood him. He was complex and nobody’s all bad. In the eighth episode, you meet his mother and get that glimpse into a little bit of what he came from and what he was trying to leave behind. You’re sort of starting to understand how does a kid who has a pretty broken background start to try to piece themselves together and have a sense of control? Even when they have demons that either have been passed down to them or have been developed as coping mechanisms. For us, Adam was somebody who really viewed himself as having a profound sense of integrity and belief that there are ways things ought to be. And as you piece the story together, the understanding that when he was with Nicky, it was such an affront to the way that he thought things were supposed to go. When he says in his sort of apparition ghost figure to Chloe in 107: If it wasn’t then it would have been another time she [Nicky] was gonna kill him. We also wanted to show that, yes, Nicky was terribly wronged and horrifically set up, and her child was taken from her, but she also was a drunk. Nothing is totally black and white or has 100 percent moral clarity.

When he’s with Chloe, this is also a life he didn’t sign up for. We have that tension between the two of them, of her comfort in the spotlight and his thinking, “Okay, now I’m with the right sister. This was who I was supposed to be with.” And then, “Oh no, wait, this also isn’t the life that I want, and this is also a life that lacks integrity, and now I’m at this job that she wanted me to be in that is corrupt.” Just trying to tap into the frustration and the resentment and the anger that he felt, never justifying the choices that he made with that anger but trying to know that the underpinnings of it were real feelings that he was having, and how clearly toxic it can be when you don’t have the capacity to process those feelings in ways that are that are healthy or safe. That was super important to us as we were building that and, of course, an actor like Corey Stoll, it’s very rare to find somebody who could really bring all of that to light. So we were very fortunate to have Corey help tell that story with us.

CORRADO We did also want to explore that he was very aware of the fact that he was very damaged and dangerous. And we went through different iterations of how we could share that, whatever that inner struggle was, and we ended up doing it the way we did. We felt like it was very important to fill that color in, because it’s very easy to demonize a character, and then when you demonize them, you write them off. So it was so important to understand him and, as Olivia said, not to justify or to excuse but sort of say, “This guy is tortured. He wants out too.” Each time this violence happened, he swore it would be the last.

Ethan goes through it in the series. His dad is murdered; he’s accused of the murder; he has a close relationship with both Chloe and Nicky and in the middle of that dynamic. But then learns that his situation could’ve been different had Adam never lied about Nicky putting him in danger and he’s left to reevaluate his life. By the series’ end, where does that leave him? Do you think there’s any resentment there with him and Chloe?

MILCH There’s so many heartbreaking realizations about what he’s been through. As you said, there’s sort of this onion that’s being peeled back and I think when you first encounter Ethan, you think, “This is kind of a spoiled, wealthy kid. He’s sweet. I like him. He’s a little bit awkward.” And Maxwell Donovan, who plays him, is just so amazing. But when he does get arrested, you think he’s capable. He’s tall. He could have maybe taken his dad on. And it’s very important to have that kind of all play out as you encountered him as a character and looked at him in a new light. But I think exactly as you’re saying, there’s so much confusion and there’s so much that’s unknown for him about the truth of his life. There are stories that you tell kids to help simplify things, especially when there’s been trauma that has happened to kids when they’re little. And I think Ethan was told a certain story that was convenient and direct, even though it was painful, about what happened with Nicky and then he went on to live a very privileged life. Then at this moment of peak adolescence, the rug gets pulled out from under him. In a certain sense, he’s going through something quite similar to what Nicky and Chloe are going through; Reexamining his childhood and reexamining the truth of what happened to him and what he can believe.

I think all teenagers have that moment where they look at their parents and they realize, “You are fallible figures. You are not just abstractions of security and authority. You are people capable of making mistakes and of lying and of doing the wrong thing.” And that is unnerving, but you have to sort of process that in order to become an adult. I think he gets the most extreme version of that and the feelings he has toward Nicky of what does it mean to get to know her and then the questioning of: Was I supposed to stay with her? Would I have made more sense if I had grown up in Ohio with Nicky? I think a lot of people, when they find out things about their childhood, start to ask those kinds of questions. How different would I be if it had been different? But I think you were very smart to pinpoint. I think that there is a lot of resentment and anger toward Chloe, particularly at the end, as he sort of realizes a lot of this was a lie, even if some of that was not her fault or her intention.

CORRADO What I think Alafair [Burke] set up for us beautifully, too, was the use of the internet as a place to put his anger that does not bring it into real time. It was actually unusually a healthy outlet for him, so he was able to to voice that: accusing of her hypocrisy and all of the things that he hated about her [Chloe] and he wanted to hurt his father. I think that that, to me, is one of his most interesting aspects as a character, because he has that one very sweet facade, but is capable of a lot of things. Like what is there underneath all of that?

It’s revealed that Nicky was the one to kill Adam. But why do you think she didn’t share that especially given Ethan was arrested and on trial for the murder?

MILCH I think there’s a question you always ask yourself when you’re thinking about characters’ choices: What if it all went according to plan? We don’t believe that Nicky came there with the intention of murdering Adam. She says, “I’m getting my sister and I’m getting my son, and I’m getting out of here.” So it really was self defense. It was, “If I don’t defend myself, he’s gonna kill me. And I know he’s capable of that, and he feels justified in doing that, because he’s gonna say I was crazy. He’s gonna make up some story about what I came here to do.” I think in the aftermath of that, when she gets that call from the police, there’s two ways that call is gonna go. She thinks, “Oh, my God, are they calling me to say we know that you’ve murdered Adam Macintosh and we’re gonna come arrest you?” But they call her and say, “You now are the legal guardian of your son” and that is the thing that she’s wanted more than anything in her life and here it is. So in a weird way, this spur of the moment decision that she had to make gives her the thing that she wants most. And how is she going to deny that to herself? But I think the thing that Elizabeth does so beautifully and is always at play with Nicky is that anxiety and that fear [of] “I’m going to be found out.” The second she gets to be with Ethan, it’s such a balm and salve to her soul of what she’s wanted for so long, and she gets to be back with her sister, which as much tension as there is, I think they both did really miss each other. If she turns herself in, she’s going to jail. She doesn’t get to be with them anymore. How could she choose that after just getting them back? I think she thinks she would never let Ethan go away for it. But is there a way to salvage the possibility that they can all be together? It’s not rational but none of it is. That was always Nicky’s North Star; getting to be with Ethan and her sister and protecting both of them. And then ultimately Chloe decides she’s going to figure out a way to protect her sister and protect her son.

CORRADO I think she could find out if Chloe was the enemy or not because she [Chloe] had betrayed her trust and taken so much from her. Coming in with the truth was probably, in her mind, a ticket right to jail. They worked some shit out.

At the end, Chloe and Nicky imply that they’re going to tell their story in a book after all. What did you want to get across with their decision to do that?

CORRADO This is also a way of healing. They’re going to tell this story, and they’re going to do it together, and the money is going to be life changing, and they’ll have a whole new set of lies they need to sort.

But it begs the question of what story are they going to tell? It feels like they’re forever bonded by secrets and their relationship is strongest when there are secrets.

MILCH I think that’s exactly right. At the heart of many families, the secrets are what bonds you together. That question of, what story are they going to tell for us? That’s sort of the story of the show. It’s this love story with these sisters but it’s, what story have you told yourself? What story are you telling together? What story are you telling the world and all of those different versions? That’s a big question for how they go forward.

At the end of the series, we see Jake (Gabriel Sloyer) lying dead on the beach. It seems to be hinted that he was killed by Bill and Gentry, can you confirm that?

MILCH To confirm? (Laughs.)

CORRADO Confirm or deny (Laughs.)

I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but it seems there’s another mystery to solve!

MILCH I think we very much wanted to deliver a very satisfactory ending for the first season and have it feel like you know what happened, like the mystery is solved. But I think that obviously the truth, particularly around these ladies in this family, is things happen. So there certainly is no definitive answer to that. For now. (Laughs.)

We also see Detective Guidry aware that despite Bill being arrested for Adam’s murder, that’s not what actually happened and knows Nicky has something to do with the murder. Is that something that she just will have to keep to herself going forward or do you see a world where she tries to still expose the truth somehow?

MILCH You know, you are asking so many wonderful questions about what it might be like to say, continue to tell this story, which is certainly something that we’ve given thought on our own. And should we be so lucky to continue to get to explore! But yes, I think Guidry, like [with] so many in this story, there’s sort of the version that is out in the public, and then the private truth. Even though at the end of the season, so many secrets have been revealed and so many mysteries sort of have been solved, there’s now this new set of lies agreed upon, and secrets and choices that have been made that are setting things in motion. She knows something that isn’t out there, and what is she going to do with that information? I think that cat and mouse between Guidry and Nicky is such a fun and satisfying dynamic and relationship in the season. So Nicky gets away, but for how long?

Well my other question was going to be whether you envision continuing the story for Chloe and Nicky, but I suppose I got my answer.

MILCH AND CORRADO (Laughs.)

Given the series is called The Better Sister, I think while watching the series the answer to who is actually the better sister can change and be hard to answer.  But what is your take on who is the better sister and why?

MILCH I think you nailed it. It depends on any given moment. That was, for us, what we were always interested in exploring. That’s also true in your relationships, it depends on the day, and we all fuck up, and we all hurt each other, and then we’re all the person who needs something, and we’re the person who shows up. That was a real guiding light for us in telling the story: All of us are trying to sort of be better than our worst selves, and we don’t always succeed. These two sisters think things about each other. The world thinks things about them. And, at different moments, one of them is trying to do the right thing, and one of them has made a mistake, and yet they sort of keep finding each other.

CORRADO It was a great opportunity for other characters to comment on how fucked up they were (Laughs.) Like, “Oh, these sisters…” The surrogate for the audience is not who’s better, it’s who’s worse? (Laughs.)

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All eight episodes of The Better Sister are now streaming on Prime Video. Read THR’s interview with Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks.