Whodunit The Better Sister slathers on too many subplots

As a title, The Better Sister has a nice ring to it, especially as the show never commits to telling us which is the superior sib here. Is it Chloe (Jessica Biel), a well-coiffed New Yorker who works in publishing and lives a life as beautifully put together as her ensembles with her lawyer husband and teenage son? Or might it be Nicky (Elizabeth Banks), a frazzled woman still working through her sobriety and aching to have a closer bond with her estranged son? The question seems rhetorical. But the more this twisty adaptation of Alafair Burke’s novel unfolds—revealing, for instance, that said son is one and the same, and that Nicky’s ex is now Chloe’s husband—the more you’re encouraged to reexamine who is  “better” between these two women still grappling with a trauma-riddled past neither can outrun.

This whodunit is centered around the death of Chloe’s husband (a.k.a. Nicky’s ex), Adam (Corey Stoll). One night after a fancy gala he’s opted to skip, Chloe (in a fab white nightgown) arrives at her house in the Hamptons to find no trace of her son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) and discovers, instead, a pool of blood that leads her to Adam’s body. He’s been stabbed, it seems, and while it is she who calls the police, there are enough red flags at the crime scene for the cops to make Chloe and eventually teenage Ethan the main suspects. After all, they both seem to have things to hide and, more to the point, motives for wanting him dead. All of that gets immediately complicated once the detectives investigating the murder (played by Kim Dickens and Bobby Naderi) get to meet Nicky. As Ethan’s sole living biological parent, she arrives to tend to her estranged son and, in the process, become a thorn in the side of these police officers who may be too eager to nail him for killing his father. And this all unfurls while both sisters have to reckon with what years apart has done to their once tight-knit bond and the kid who’s caught in their crosshairs.

That family dynamic alone feels meaty enough to make for an intriguing murder mystery. Nicky’s past addiction and the reckless actions that led to Adam leaving her and eventually marrying Chloe are fertile ground on which to paint a portrait of responsibility and sisterly betrayal. You could say the same about Chloe and Adam’s marriage, which is—surprise—not as picture-perfect as it appears from the outside. And Biel and Banks shade their roles with enough nuance to show that there may have been errors made on both ends: Biel finds in Chloe a stoic restraint that clearly keeps her demons at bay, while Banks makes Nicky the kind of woman who needs to always be in motion lest she pause enough to assess what’s going on in her head. Theirs is a bond fraught with the abusive household they grew up in—the one Chloe presumably left behind and Nicky cannot seem to escape. But that’s not all The Better Sister has in store.