Bad Sisters & the cozification of television
Cottagecore with a side of murder? Ok I'll bite.
Babe, are you okay, you’ve hardly touched your critical thinking skills? I don’t know about you, but I’m simply exhausted from this summer. My first summer in this new city, every weekend spent out and about, in and out of restaurants and breweries and summer shenanigans. The whole summer felt like a two-year catch up on social debt. My television watching list got longer and longer, and I got more brutal about cutting shows out when they weren’t clicking (I’m so sorry, Pretty Little Liars, She-Hulk, and Tales of the Walking Dead).
I’m starting to yearn for cozy, cool weekends, Gilmore Girls and mulled wine, and getting back into critical television texts to reorient my mind around the television landscape. I feel I need to prepare myself emotionally (and intellectually) for what might shift around the kind of shows that are green-lit in a landscape where HBO Max is allegedly pushing out diversity in favour of their “middle American” audience and Netflix continues to pump out uninventive content, plus overall layoffs in these industries amidst a looming recession.
All of that contrasting with massive Intellectual Property franchise projects like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon, and the various Stars Wars/Marvel shows rushing through production. It’s an existential time for the study of television; a rich, ever-liminal space where the foundations of what we know television to be keep collapsing under our feet unexpectedly, like everything else lately. But before I can get into critical discourse, that September back-to-school mindset, I need to truly exhale from the last few months. I’m turning back to cottagecore.
Cottagecore is something of a turn-of-the-decade term and an “aesthetic movement” firmly placed in 2020, coinciding with lockdowns and an escape from bustling city centres to the modernist fantasy of living in the woods, foraging the land, and a broader nostalgia for slow living. I love the ways in which queer communities, particularly lesbians, took up space online during this discourse, feeling a sense of comfort in the sanctuary of cottagecore as a space to be yourself.
In the cottagecore universe, there are no phones pinging constantly with updates, no urgent work emails, no evenings spent responding to the onerous demands of a tyrannical boss. In fact, there is no labor beyond domestic, and workaday tasks are completed with a gauzy sense of fulfillment. (New York Times, March 2020)
There is (of course) the more critical side to cottagecore unearthed by some critics (interestingly, the NYT article cites Tumblr posts on this), pointing out its close aesthetic similarities to the early days of settler-colonialism in North America and elsewhere. But as the slow food and slow fashion movements demonstrate, the aesthetic possibilities of cottagecore can be rooted in social justice and ethical, sustainable considerations beyond people burying their heads in the sand in an attempt to ignore the very tangible problems of the world.
So what about cottagecore on television?
The first time the girls on Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters try to murder The Prick, their manipulative and abusive brother-in-law played by Claes Bang (Alexander Skarsgård was booked, I guess), they try to combust a cozy forest cottage where he happened to be staying for the night. The second time they attempt to murder The Prick, the sisters forage mushrooms from a nearby forest in an attempt to create a poison.
This is all occurring between scenes of hushed conversations over clutched glasses of wine in Eva’s (Sharon Horgan) gorgeous beach house, in a room facing the ocean surrounded by bay windows, seagulls crooning in the background. The Prick might be the object of their fury from years of pent-up frustration after seeing their sister succumb to his gaslighting and abuse, but the show operates on a much more comedic basis, and to my delight, is firmly rooted in the cottagecore aesthetics of rural Ireland.
Bad Sisters is not the first show that’s been cozified. There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the “cozy mystery,” which goes hand-in-hand with the idea of a “cozy” British crime drama, where violence occurs mostly off-screen and the drama centres on the dynamics of a small town or community. There are other shows that frontload with palpable cozy, like Gilmore Girls (duh), or the third season of Master of None, which focuses on Denise (Lena Waithe) and her new wife as they settle into a 150-year-old house in upstate New York. The entire season is shot through a 4:3 (old TV) aspect ratio with a soft, grainy visual texture. Fire crackles in the fireplace, candles are lit and intimate dinners are hosted.
Bad Sisters is Big Little Lies without the financial excess. The titular sisters all live within driving distance from each other, and the show is all sweaters, little potted plants on windowsills, cozy drinks at the pub, and quirky insurance brokers trying to solve the central murder. The show is written and created by Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, This Way Up), who has long been bringing her creative vision to television via her production company, Merman. Bad Sisters is the culmination of her creative vision, her frequent insight into parenthood, sisterhood, and shitty men that make her other shows so poignant.
Anyways, I’m not really saying anything revolutionary here, except pointing you to toward the art of selecting a series that evokes a sense of comfort and joy rather than pain and misery for the sake of keeping up with Twitter discourse. Television has been a universal source of comfort for decades, a coping mechanism through rough patches, and it’s no surprise that it’s the medium that I (and most of you, I suspect) return to again and again for that sense of catharsis and internal processing: whether it’s watching Gilmore Girls for the tenth time or exploring Bad Sisters, avenues for a moment of fall coziness.