Since the writers strike began, I’ve seen an uptick in repostings of the season 3 Barry scene in which a streaming service executive (Elizabeth Perkins) attempts to explain to Sarah Goldberg‘s Sally why her newly released show is being canceled. The sequence, which places the blame on a nefarious algorithm, hits home as more than just an accurately observed piece of absurdity because of how good Goldberg is at playing both the ridiculousness and the plausibility of the moment.
I get happy whenever the scene gets passed around because although Barry is far from underrated or insufficiently acclaimed, if any element of the brooding Hollywood hitman comedy has failed to receive its proper due, it’s Goldberg. Sure, she has a single Emmy nomination, but that doesn’t feel like enough for a performance that has often anchored the entire series. That’s very much been the case in the past couple of Barry episodes — and since the HBO series is in its concluding run and the Emmy voting window is about to open, I’m endorsing anything that makes anybody remember and recognize just how good Sarah Goldberg is.
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SisterS
The timing is perfect, then, for the premiere of SisterS, a six-episode series co-production between Ireland’s RTÉ, Canada’s Crave and its U.S. distributor, IFC.
Created by, written and starring Goldberg and Irish actress Susan Stanley, SisterS rarely feels like the best or most clearly focused version of its darkly comic, generally familiar premise, relying heavily on vaguely tweaking cultural stereotypes instead of developing a clear satirical eye of its own. But if you just watch it as a vehicle for showcasing the versatility of its stars, there are more than enough pleasures to fill the swift time.
Goldberg plays Sare, a Canadian of only vaguely determined age and occupation. When her mother dies, Sare discovers something unclear — lots of the plot details in SisterS are left intentionally fuzzy — about the father she’s never met, and she immediately catches a plane to Dublin to fill in some blanks about her ancestry.
“I’ve always had this kind of affinity with Irish culture. I saw Riverdance nine times growing up. I had a U2 cover band at my bat mitzvah,” Sare gushes to the driver taking her into town, where she meets her father’s ex-wife Sheryl (Sophie Thompson) and Suze (Stanley), the half-sister she never knew she had. Suze is on the verge of unemployment, on the verge of being evicted from her flat and stuck in the middle of several ill-conceived relationships. Sare, who has a stable fiancé back in Canada, and Suze seem to be total opposites, but as they go on a rambling adventure to track down their father, they bond through adversity and inevitable similarities emerge.
The challenge with fish-out-of-water comedies is always who or what the joke is going to be directed at. Are you mocking the fish? The water? The presumably water-free new environment in which the fish finds itself? And how much cultural critique can you direct at any of those targets without coming across as condescending or ignorant or both?
SisterS ends up taking a wishy-washy middle ground, as you might be able to predict from the sampled line of dialogue above. Nobody in the Ireland that Sare is about to discover does step-dancing, and presumably for budgetary reasons there’s nary a U2 song to be heard, because those jokes are directed at Sare and her naive assumptions. But after the fourth or fifth pub that the characters wander into, receiving whiskey-soaked wisdom and listening to a string of Once-style crooners, it’s tempting to wonder if there’s a meaningful difference between the assumed clichés and the clichéd reality? And the assumptions go both ways, of course, since everybody Sare meets just assumes she’s from the United States and nobody knows that her apologetic sincerity — drinking every time she says “Sorry” with the exaggerated long-“o” would be a deadly game — is a stereotype of its own.
There are several points at which you can imagine SisterS wanting to say something about actual modern life in Ireland, but only landing at a halfway point between “old” and “new” and therefore not saying anything at all — like how the series treats a funny and slightly disturbing subplot involving abortion. The show knows that there’s a cultural conversation to be had, but not how it wants to participate. Sometimes the show wants to amplify its authentic Irishness and sometimes it wants to cast several key roles with non-Irish actors doing inconsistent accents — Thompson affecting a lilt and fixating on Sare’s Jewishness is funny, if pointless — and sometimes you get an episode that climaxes with a drunken Irish wake, just because.
Might there be a version of SisterS in which more of the stereotypes were turned on their heads, that found an angle on contemporary religion in Ireland that could have given nuance to the abortion subplot and would have made Sheryl’s innocuous antisemitism have substance? Probably, and it might have been better. But the show that’s here isn’t bad, in large part because longtime friends and collaborators Goldberg and Stanley build the relationship between these strangers in a way that is likably warm and yet uneasy, without going quite as dark as the show’s clear inspirations — Fleabag and, especially, Catastrophe are central to the DNA — might have gone. SisterS has undercurrents exploring alcoholism, abuse and the impact of absentee parents, but it’s more likely to settle for broad humor over meaning in its murkier terrain.
In Sare, Goldberg has an especially good part, one that complements many of the strengths accentuated in Barry. It’s easy to imagine that Goldberg has spent much of her career being called in to play generically pretty blondes, which was the place Sally started as well, when what she’d rather do is play sloppy and screwed-up. Sare begins as a sunny and well-adjusted version of Canadian identity and then she gets messier and messier, more prone to swearing at children and ugly-crying, making both sides of the character believable. It’s a good pairing opposite Stanley, whose Suze begins in chaos but shows her capabilities more as the sisters hit the road in a borrowed ice cream truck and we come to understand more about what shaped her.
Erratic Irish accent aside, Thompson is the best of the supporting players, bringing sad humor and a good contrast with her current earthy turn in Apple TV+’s Silo. The series also features several good cameos including the reliable Fionnula Flanagan as the grieving widow at the aforementioned wake and a nice turn that I won’t spoil by the Canadian actor playing the girls’ father.
Mostly you’ll want to check out SisterS for chemistry between Stanley and Goldberg and as convincing proof that Goldberg’s setting herself up for interesting things after Barry is over. It doesn’t immediately mark the stars as Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Sharon Horgan-style hyphenates. The comedy needs to hurt more to hit those heights. But there’s potential here.
