(This story contains major spoilers from Bad sisters season one and the first two episodes of season two)

After the success of the first season of Bad sisters on AppleTV+, creator and star Sharon Horgan had the challenge of coming up with a new storyline.

In the first season, four of the five starring Garvey sisters devise different ways to kill John Paul (Claes Bang), the abusive husband of their sister Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), but John Paul dies at Grace’s hands . himself. With that villain defeated, Horgan still wanted season two to have the same kind of energy, as well as the audience’s continued emotional appeal to the sisters.

“(I was) just thinking about how I could give everyone the same level of entertainment, story and emotion, really. How to make it feel like the first season, but also completely different. To keep the DNA of the show, but do something unexpected,” says Horgan The Hollywood Reporter.

“How can we make it even better?” adds Dearbhla Walsh, executive producer and director of the series.

And so Horgan, who also stars on the show as Eva, Garvey’s eldest sister, turned to a storyline spurred by the fallout from Grace’s actions in season one, and the cover-up by her sisters and others around them.

“The biggest thing was emotionally dealing with the fallout of what happened to all those sisters in season one, and how they move forward with it and how they get away with it — until they don’t,” Horgan said.

At the start of season two, set in Dublin two years after the events of season one, Grace has some rare moments of joy, including having her bachelorette party at the track with her sisters, and a backyard wedding with her new partner Ian Reilly, played by cast newcomer Owen McDonnell. Filming those scenes was also a nice emotional break for Duff.

“The day of the races was just the most fun, when we bet on the winning horse and we went wild. I loved that because I got to be another Grace. Plus the wedding was a fantastic few days. And we had everything. We had blue skies and hurricanes, and it was just classic,” says Duff THR.

In addition to McDonnell, Killing Eva’Fiona Shaw joins the series as the new character, Angelica, sister of Roger, Grace’s former neighbor, who helped cover up John Paul’s death. While Angelica enters social situations, largely unwanted, making jokes and inserting herself into the Garvey family drama with both a hypocritical and a penetrating attitude. Shaw was the clear choice for the role, Horgan says, adding that she and Walsh courted her and were incredibly nervous about meeting her.

“We all think she’s funny, but even with things like ‘Harry Potter,’ I always thought, ‘That’s a very, very funny woman,’” Horgan said. “She reminds me of Molly Shannon, she has such physicality in her performance. She is so known for her great, heavy stage roles, and she can basically do anything, but I always thought she was incredibly funny, so I want to delve into that more. And it was just so amazing because she gave us that and more.

The fun of the first episode quickly changes, Duff notes, as the police visit Grace’s house after discovering the body of John Paul’s father in a suitcase in the lake (a season one death unrelated to the sisters), which brings back suspicions about the circumstances surrounding the episode. The death of John Paul. As the pressure mounts, Grace decides to tell Ian that she was responsible for her late husband’s death. Ian disappears shortly afterwards.

“At the beginning of episode one, she’s in such a beautiful place, but she admits so early in that episode that the stakes are so high. In episode two, she’s just a hummingbird, right? And she can’t land. She can’t land anywhere. So I felt like that was the energy I had to keep holding on to. It was much tighter, whereas in season one she becomes as invisible as she can be. This season she is just trying to stay above water,” says Duff.

Grace’s anxiety increases as her sisters also begin to question her recent actions, including her fits of rage, and the second episode ends with Grace leaving a panicked voicemail to Eva asking for help. The episode is then interrupted by the sounds of a car crash, sirens and Blanaid (Saise Quinn), Grace’s daughter, crying in a police car arriving at Eva’s house.

Similar to season one, which used time jumps to show John Paul dead in the present, interspersed with flashbacks to the sisters who each tried to kill him, Horgan wanted to add time jumps this season. The first episode opens with the sisters popping the trunk of a car overlooking a cliff at night, before returning to the present, while the second episode features some gaps between Grace’s frantic actions.

The shocking Grace ending after the first two episodes will be big in season two, with viewers hoping for answers in episode three.

“There are many ways to tell a story,” Horgan said. “In the first season we had the jump between two timelines. And so I think we all wanted to play with time in a creative way. It’s nice to give the audience something to try out over the course of the season.”

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Bad sisters season two releases new episodes Wednesday on Apple TV+.