This article has some spoilers for The Better Sister – if you haven’t watched yet, maybe go do that and come back? You’ve been warned!
I need you to believe me when I say this show will have you hooked within the first five minutes. It wastes no time getting to the plot (very thankful for this), and the storytelling is so compelling, you’re left wanting more. No seriously, each episode seems to end on a cliffhanger and you can’t help but wonder what happens next.
Episode one, titled “That’s My Sister”, introduces the plot of the series with Adam’s death within the first few minutes. We then get a flashback to earlier that day: Chloe is an author and editor-in-chief of a magazine called The Real Thing. She’s closing out a meeting, before stepping away with her son, Ethan, to get ready for the night’s event.
Chloe comes off as someone who cares more than she should about how she’s perceived in the public. The day after the event, she spends the morning reading google alerts with her name attached – reading articles and the comments that aren’t so kind. While at another event hosted by Catherine Lancaster, Chloe is glued to her phone. The comments really get to her, and Adam is nowhere to be found. She heads home and that brings us back to the start of everything.
When Chloe gets home, she finds Adam’s body covered in blood. She’s panicked and calls 911 for help, but Adam was already dead before help arrived.
“She’s My Sister” – THE BETTER SISTER, Pictured: Jessica Biel as Chloe Taylor, Kim Dickens as Nancy Guidry, Maxwell Acee Donovan as Ethan Macintosh, and Bobby Naderi as Matt Bowen. Photo: Jojo Whilden/ Prime © 2025 Amazon Content Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
An investigation begins and Chloe is being interrogated by detectives Nancy Guidry and Matt Bowen. She’s telling them everything she can recall from the night, and I mean everything. There’s a point where I was like “Chloe, please call a lawyer”. It was when they went to the home and interviewed Ethan without her present. Ethan is a minor. Because of her lack of sense here, everything the detectives gathered lead them to implicate Ethan for the murder of his own father.
Paperwork confirmed that Chloe wasn’t Ethan’s biological mother. His mother is Nicole (or Nicky) Macintosh, Adam’s ex-wife. It gets even more insane though, because it turns out, Nicky, is Chloe’s older sister. Because Ethan is a minor, he needs to be with his legal guardian which is Nicky (on a technicality since Adam and Chloe never made that official).
Chloe and Nicky clearly don’t get along. Watching them try to come together for Ethan was interesting. It was hard to see Nicky as a responsible parent because of how they painted her at the start, but man are we fooled with her. Yes, she was an alcoholic and drug addict, but growing up the way she did, I can’t blame her.
We’ll get to that in a bit, but as of now, she’s still seen as the troubled one who is incapable of being there for Ethan when that couldn’t be further from the truth right now. Because of Chloe’s lack of awareness with the law, her allowing the detectives to talk to Ethan alone led to Ethan being arrested for his father’s murder.
“Lotta Sky” – THE BETTER SISTER, Pictured: Jessica Biel as Chloe Taylor, Kim Dickens as Nancy Guidry, Maxwell Acee Donovan as Ethan Macintosh, and Bobby Naderi as Matt Bowen. Photo: Jojo Whilden/ Prime © 2025 Amazon Content Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
So many things started to come out about Ethan, but the entire time I kept saying to myself I’d be shocked if he was truly the killer. They brought up a past incident at his school when he was caught with a gun in his backpack. Tabloids were writing articles about him, painting him to be an angry teenager with a history of violence.
Jake helped Chloe with finding a lawyer for Ethan. Michelle Sanders steps in right away to get to know Ethan and try to figure out how to help him. I will say, it was good on Nicky to call out Chloe for not getting Ethan a lawyer sooner. Detective Guidry and Detective Bowen are going really hard to prove Ethan did this, but the evidence they had against him isn’t holding up.
Ethan was denied bail at his hearing which means he had to stay locked up while waiting for trial. Michelle didn’t want any surprises at trial so she asks Chloe how she and Nicky came to this arrangement where Ethan would live with her and not his mother.
The trial didn’t look like it was going to go the way both Chloe and Nicky hoped, but when they took the stand, they introduced the fact that Chloe was having an affair with Jake, who also worked with Adam. Chloe details how abusive Adam was and that Jake had knowledge of this abuse. Jake was also called to testify, and when he took the stand he answered all of the questions the same, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.” She even asks him directly if he killed Adam and he repeats the same.
Major mic drop moment for Michelle in Ethan’s defense. The jury found Ethan not guilty and he was able to go home.
“She’s My Sister” – THE BETTER SISTER, Pictured: Kim Dickens as Nancy Guidry and Bobby Naderi as Matt Bowen. Photo: Cara Howe/ Prime © 2025 Amazon Content Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Episode four titled “Gazpacho” is when things started to get really interesting for me. Chloe’s seemingly perfect life is starting to fall apart as each article is released. Learning what Nicky has endured during her childhood (her father making whiskey hot chocolates, her father nearly sexually assaulting her, her father yelling at her more than Chloe), it’s no surprise she turned out the way she did.
When Nicky confides in her sister saying “I told you because I’m tired of carrying it alone—”, she instantly starts to blame her for everything currently going wrong in her life. No compassion, no consideration for her feelings, just a problem. It’s very clear that her memory of the events were different.
All Nicky wanted to do was protect her younger sister – as they spend more time together, Chloe is starting to doubt everything she thought she knew about their childhood. Of course it was different for her because her sister made sure of it. Even as they’re older Nicky continues to protect her. At the end of episode seven titled “Back from Red”, after Chloe learns that Adam lied about the sequence of events that led to Ethan living with them and Nicky being put on a psych hold, she starts to break down. Nicky tried to absolve her saying she gave Ethan a chance at a somewhat better life than she could have at the time. That all changed when Ethan confided in her that Adam was abusing Chloe, and she took it upon herself to do what she does best, protect her sister. This is when we learned that it was Nicky who killed Adam.
“Just Ask” – THE BETTER SISTER, Pictured: Jessica Biel as Chloe Taylor and Elizabeth Banks as Nancy Macintosh. Photo: Jojo Whilden/ Prime © 2025 Amazon Content Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Throughout the series, I was trying to find a sister to blame. A part of me was trying to figure out who, between Chloe and Nicky, was the better sister. Verdict: deadlock. There are moments when I’m siding with Nicky, but then Chloe shows a different side to her where I see how much she truly does care for her sister and redeems herself.
I was afraid for Nicky when it looked like Detective Guidry was going to get her way, but thankfully it all worked in Nicky’s favor. She deserves this second chance at life.
I could talk about this show for days, but I’d like to hear from you! What’d you think of The Better Sister? Share your thoughts below.
