When ‘Bad Sisters’ team up to kill, the result is an engaging, lovable black comedy

In the engaging Apple TV+ series “Bad Sisters,” closely adapted by Sharon Horgan from the Belgian series “Clan” and set in and around Dublin, four sisters set out to liberate a fifth from the husband who is destroying her. Besides the fragile Grace, whose husband, and above-mentioned corpse, John Paul, is grinding her down to nothing, there is Ursula, a nurse and mother of four, somehow managing an adulterous affair with her photography teacher; angry Bibi, who lost an eye in an accident the details of which will become significant; and bright-eyed Becka, the baby, a massage therapist, who has a history of ill-advised relationships, but considerable life force. Claes Bang, right, shown with Sharon Horgan, plays the genuinely despicable villain of the dark comedy “Bad Sisters.” Murder, of course, isn’t right, though it offers comic possibilities that a more rational approach to Grace’s situation — say, therapy leading to divorce — would not. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to keep the viewer’s sympathy with the attempting murderers, and Horgan, her writers and her cast pull this off expertly, not just through the unrelieved awfulness of John Paul — a common enough trick, making the antagonist-victim less sympathetic than his protagonist-attackers — but by the portrayal of the sisters, who, though not without flaws, are well-rounded, recognizably human and coming ultimately from a place of love. Along with the sisters’ individual storylines, intrafamilial tensions and the often farcical failures of their attempts to kill John Paul — not without some serious collateral damage, seriously felt — keep things chugging throughout the series’ length.