An ‘unlikely love story’
Best friends play half-sisters on road trip to find their father
A perky Canadian woman meets a cynical Irish one, who quickly decides they’re never going to be friends.
It happens in the first episode of “SisterS,” a new comedy coming to Crave on Wednesday. It also happened in real life to the series’ cocreators, Canadian actor Sarah Goldberg and Irish actor Susan Stanley, when they met at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art 19 years ago.
“I was, like, so green, fresh from Canada, so naive,” said Goldberg in a joint Zoom call.
How naive? “I was living with the school drug dealer for six months and didn’t realize. I just thought everybody came over after school for 15 minutes because we were popular.”
Stanley, on the other hand, “had kind of 800 years of the oppression of Irish history on my shoulders. So I came to London quite cynical, quite hard, tough, you know, smoking fags,” she said, using the British and Irish word for cigarettes. “And then I met Sarah, who was this bright-eyed 19-year-old that didn’t have a drop of self-loathing, which really bamboozled me.
“And so I thought, ‘Well, we’re obviously never gonna be friends because she’s a weirdo.’”
The weirdo and the tough girl, in fact, became best friends, brought together by a mutual love of Leonard Cohen (the “patron saint” of Canada, as Goldberg describes him), and his song “Famous Blue Raincoat.” And they are still “soul mates,” in Stanley’s words, even after making a TV show together.
That show is “SisterS,” which the duo co-wrote and in which they play newly discovered half-siblings, one from Toronto, one from Dublin, who go on a comically fraught road trip to find their alcoholic birth father.
Dubliner Stanley and Vancouverite Goldberg, known for her role in the HBO comedy “Barry,” toiled on the show for about six years, but you could say it started gestating in London when they first met.
They were writing together while at the academy with the vision of starting their own theatre company, including one play set in a bathtub that Goldberg called “probably incredibly pretentious and precocious.” With no tub available at school, they had fellow students drag a ridiculously heavy antique one into the building from a construction site and likely “ruined three floors in our drama school that’s (six years) older than Canada.”
But writing went on the back burner post-graduation while they pursued acting careers … until they came up with the idea for “SisterS.”
“I think throughout the years we always wanted to find a story … about how we came together in this very unlikely love story,” Stanley said.
“We sort of took versions of who we were when we met and exaggerated them,” said Goldberg. “And there were themes we wanted to explore. We wanted to explore childhood trauma, we wanted to explore alcoholism, we wanted to explore chosen family.”
In “SisterS,” Sare (Goldberg) learns after her mother dies that her real father was an Irish busker with whom her mother had a fling, so she flies to Dublin to track him down. There she meets an unenthusiastic Suze (Stanley) and bribes her into a road trip.
Sare is chipper and polite, with a healthy bank account and a fiancé waiting for her back home. Suze is surly, drinks too much, is having a fling with a married man, and loses both her apartment and her job when Sare arrives.
More layers are revealed when the half-sisters take a broken-down ice cream truck to Galway in search of their dad, Jimmy, played by Ottawa-born Donal Logue.
Along the way, Sare has an abortion; they crash an Irish wake in the series’ funniest episode; have illfated romantic adventures; admit some hard truths about the people closest to them and eventually find their father.
Don’t expect a typical happy ending, however.
Inspired by other women writeractors like Michaela Coel (“I May Destroy You”), Phoebe WallerBridge (“Fleabag”) and Sharon Horgan (“Catastrophe”), the duo was interested in “this kind of brutal, ugly honesty where a person is not one thing,” Stanley said.
“They can be wonderful and lovely, but they also have this other side, which can be dark and awful and horrendous, and that kind of whole 360 of what it is to be a woman and to be a human.”
“We also wanted to be truthful in the complexities of life as a woman in your 30s,” added Goldberg. “I feel like we see so many stories with these very one-dimensional so-called happy endings for women that are about finding a man and having a baby, and we just wanted to … challenge it and ask questions about it.”
In the case of Sare’s use of the abortion pill, for example, “we wanted it to be very clear that this is somebody who’s made a positive decision for their life,” Goldberg said. “And it’s not like we’re making fun of abortion, but why can’t this exist in a comedic space? … And so we were trying to push the boundaries on that.”
Over the years, as actors, Stanley and Goldberg have had plenty of experience with boundaries.
“We worked for a lot of men and we’ve had a lot of small parts, and things where we’re saying lines that are either buoying up a male character or are simply asking them questions,” said Goldberg. “So we were, like, this doesn’t represent the women we know. This doesn’t represent us. And so (to) all these other women that we were so inspired by, we thought we want to add our voices to the conversation. We’re new writers and we’re putting ourselves out there.”
“SisterS” is, in fact, the first TV writing and showrunning credit for both, and making the show was an exhilarating but exhausting experience.
“We shot six episodes in six weeks,” said Goldberg. (By comparison, on “Barry,” the HBO show for which Goldberg has been nominated for an Emmy, eight episodes are shot over four or five months.)
“The learning curve was vertical, but we loved it. You know, we wouldn’t change a thing,” she added.
“We were pretty broken because it was quite a gruelling schedule. But we did have Guinness and we had the Irish Sea,” said Stanley. (The series, an Irish-Canadian co-production, was shot in Ireland.)
Of course, it takes a village to make a TV show, and Goldberg and Stanley were full of praise for their collaborators, singling out, among others, their cast of mostly Irish and British actors, Canadian composer Rob Carli (“Murdoch Mysteries”), Canadian-British editor Diane Brunjes and Toronto production company Shaftesbury.
“We’re not saying this because we’re chatting to you as a Canadian, but we have had such support from the Canadians like Shaftesbury,” Stanley said.
“I mean, first-time writers and first-time showrunners, and they’ve just facilitated us and trusted us … It all just came together. I’m still thanking my lucky stars. I can’t believe it.”
“SISTERS” IS STREAMING ON CRAVE, SUNDANCE NOW AND AMC PLUS.