Creators on Why Nicky Killed Adam

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “The Better Sister,” now streaming on Prime Video.

When building out the whodunit of Prime Video’s “The Better Sister,” the series’ co-creators Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado wanted the audience to believe anyone could have plunged a knife into the neck of Adam (Corey Stoll). By muddying up everyone’s image (adulterers, addicts and egotistical tycoons alike), they gave themselves plenty of options to choose from when deciding who got blood on their hands and the white rug.

But in the end, none of these suspects were as tempting as staying faithful to the ending of Alafair Burke’s book on which the series was based. In both cases, Nicky (Elizabeth Banks) is the one who killed her ex-husband after she learns from their son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) that Adam had gotten physical with Chloe (Jessica Biel), his current wife and Nicky’s sister. She reveals everything to Chloe in the finale, including how she learned Adam’s mean streak wasn’t new. On the fateful day she believed she had gotten drunk, passed out in the pool and nearly let an infant Ethan drown, Nicky had actually been drugged by Adam to give him grounds to get full custody of their son.

Motivated by these revelations, Nicky arrives at Adam and Chloe’s house, in that barn-storming way she is known to do — not kill him, but to confront him. And yet, when Adam’s temper again rears its ugly head, Nicky has no choice but to defend herself in the ensuing struggle, killing her former husband in self-defense before high-tailing it back to Ohio to pretend like she was never there.

Despite the character’s recovery and redemption in the eyes of her sister and the audience being central to the show, Milch tells Variety that she and Corrado never considered anyone else to be Adam’s killer — because Nicky did more than just kill.

“Nicky shows up to protect her sister in the moment that he becomes violent,” Milch says. “She is choosing to protect her sister, she’s choosing to protect herself. That’s what the show is for us. It is two sisters finding each other again in love, and the way in which sometimes love presents as self protection and violence. We never really questioned that choice.”

This, of course, means that Nicky and Chloe now have the problem of covering up her involvement in the murder, of which their son had just been exonerated. Continuing the reasonable doubt case Chloe began weaving in court by throwing her lover Jake (Gabriel Sloyer) under the bus, the sisters then implicate Bill (Matthew Modine), Adam’s business partner, in the crime. The police eat it up, or at least Det. Matt Bowen (Bobby Naderi) does. 

Det. Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) doesn’t buy it, especially after Adam’s mother (Deirdre O’Connell) spills the beans that Nicky wasn’t in Ohio when he was murder, only her phone was there. Oh, and just to sever any hope she might find an ally in Guidry, Nicky purposefully leaks the detective’s shameful secret that she mistakenly and violently assaulted a Black man years ago in the line of duty.

But will their plan to frame Bill stick? Between his deep pockets and Guidry’s vengeful thirst to prove their involvement, the sisters may have created more problems than they’ve solved. And there’s at least one new body left in their wake: In the final moments of the series, Jake washes up in the surf outside his home, with no clear signs of who killed the poor lovestruck guy.

Prime Video has advertised “The Better Sister” as a limited series, but Milch is more than ready to keep going should the show get traction. “Everything the audience knows about what is happening in these characters’ lives would make them believe there’s more,” she says. “We would feel very lucky to be able to continue to tell the story and, God willing, we will be there.”

Below, Milch and Corrado share why they credit Olivia’s father David Milch (the creator of “Deadwood”) with bringing them together for “The Better Sister,” whether they have any ideas about who killed Jake — and if they really believe that Chloe and Nicky got away with it.

Regina has worked on some great shows like “Deadwood” with Olivia’s dad David Milch, but you two have never worked on the same series until now. What brought you together for this project?

Olivia Milch: We’ve known each other for 20 years. I was lucky enough to grow up around many incredibly talented writers, but Regina’s name, I always jokingly say, was on the Mount Rushmore of writers that my dad would talk about. So I’ve always been a fan, and we got to rekindle our relationship professionally a few years ago when we were working on my dad’s memoir together because my dad has Alzheimer’s. Then, when I was building out a room for “The Better Sister,” I reached out to her and thought it would be a dream to have her. I just never imagined really that I could be so lucky, and then we started together and not to be lame or cliché, but it really was like family. 

To work on this show together, in particular, there is a foundation of this unconditional love, there’s a foundation of respect. We both have gotten to learn at the knee of a great master, and so we have the same set of standards. There’s nothing we can say that would offend each other. Like we can be as vile and vulgar as we want. We both immediately felt like it was such fun, and it’s rare that you get to write like this. We’ll call it dueting, so we’ll send scenes back and forth. There’s nothing more exciting to me than opening up my email knowing I have a new scene from Regina, or she’s read a scene I’ve written and added her touch. It doesn’t get better than that.

Regina Corrado: That is so special.You can technically vibe with somebody, but this kind of thing has been really amazing. And I think it’s because we have your dad as the foundation, too. But I remember not working for your father anymore, and missing him so much. It actually hurt me. I thought maybe this was the antidote to that, and it was, because I got to be in the family again.

This series is based on a book, so you had a roadmap going in. But did you always plan to stick to the book’s ending with Nicky killing Adam? 

Milch: We have this amazing foundation in the book that Alafair Burke wrote, so that was the jumping off point for us. There’s definitely moments of divergence in the show from the book, but I think that was something for us that always felt so right because at the heart of that choice is an act of love and protection. Nicky shows up to protect her sister in the moment that he becomes violent. She is choosing to protect her sister, she’s choosing to protect herself. That’s what the show is for us. It is two sisters finding each other again in love, and the way in which sometimes love presents as self protection and violence. We never really questioned that choice. But I think it was always incredibly important to us that we understood why or how every character could have been responsible for it. We wanted to make sure that everybody was a suspect, not just because it’s fun to watch, but because we are layered, complicated people that all have that within us. We didn’t want it to feel like that is only something a monster could access.

Corey Stoll’s character is kept at arm’s length, which isn’t usually the case for a murder victim. Instead, his presence is more like a ghost (literally at times), and a wedge between these two sisters. Did you have to resist centralizing your victim?

Milch: There’s actually three men that these two sisters share in their life. Their father, their husband and their son, right? All three of those male characters, we get to know as people who both bring them together and pull them apart in a certain sense. Corey gives such an amazing performance because he has intelligence and gravitas. We were so focused on getting him because we knew he was going to be able to be such a presence over these women’s lives. You have to believe that both of them fell in love with this man. But also that the idea of this life he was going to have with each of these sisters turned out to be wrong, and that there’s such a fundamental sense of disappointment and resentment in terms of what their life turned out to be, for all of them. 

So having him as the ghostly presence in the show is about his relationship with Chloe. What would an honest conversation between the two of them look like? She’s processing. She’s working through that, and so he lingers in that way. And when does Nicky see him, and what does she have access to? I think there are ways that we carry people within us to varying degrees, even when they’re not always with us. But once these two sisters are together, that’s the central relationship of their life. 

Corrado: And if he had to go to bring them back together, that was just the way it was going to be. You know, that was fate.

We are left at the end of this series with a dead body. Jake had more than a few people threatening his life, including FBI Agent Olivero (Frank Pando) and maybe even his now-former boss, Bill (Matthew Modine). So would you like to tell viewers who killed Jake?

Milch: Well, he certainly did have a lot of threats against him, didn’t he?

Corrado: It could have been anybody!

Milch: We cared very deeply about delivering a very satisfying ending to the season and to the show. For us, there is an ongoingness to these characters’ lives. I think that is what was outside of the screen. We spent so much time on their past, their backstories and what makes them, and that brought the texture and the authenticity of who these characters are. So the idea that that anything concludes with a neat bow felt like bullshit, both in terms of storytelling and also in terms of the realities of these characters’ lives. 

Everything the audience knows about what is happening in these characters’ lives would make them believe there’s more. We would feel very lucky to be able to continue to tell the story and, God willing, we will be there. But I think mostly just in terms of the demands of the story itself, we felt like it wouldn’t be right to say, “And then everything was happily ever after.” That ain’t it with this group of people!

Corrado: Definitely not with them! 

Milch: So everybody should watch the show and rewatch it, and then hopefully we can get to keep maybe thinking about what happened to Jake.

So you’re pleading the fifth on who, in your mind, killed Jake, yes?

Milch: Yes. We certainly have thoughts, but more will be revealed, as we like to say in the rooms.

This is definitely a limited series that leaves you with more questions. Chloe and Nicky’s plan to frame Bill feels flimsy at best. Guidry isn’t likely to let go of what Nicky exposed about her. And, just spitballing here, if they are going to write a book together, maybe part of that process is solving the murder of the man with whom Chloe was having an affair.

Milch: Well, your lips to Jeff Bezos’ ears!

If we are, indeed, to believe that Chloe and Nicky could come together and agree on their story for a book, what do you envision as the title of that book?

Corrado: That is such a great question, and I will go ahead and say it’s not “Smuggler’s Gulch.”

Milch: That is one of the many titles of Ken’s [Paul Sparks] books that we came up with, so not that! This is something we haven’t actually discussed, but now we’re going to go off and talk about it endlessly. You know, there was an alternate title actually to my dad’s memoir that we had thought about: “A Life Recollected” or “A Life Re-Collected.” So immediately what comes to mind is “Lives, Recollected.” Emphasis on the recollecting of these lives brought back and pieced back together, and what that actually means. So that’s a contender.

There is a great deal of white privilege on display in this series, just by nature of Chloe and Adam’s world. But throughout the season, there is also a recurring conversation about race and justice. We hear it in court during Ethan’s trial from the prosecutor who believes he is being treated differently than a Black teenager might be. We hear Gloria Reuben’s character mention her upbringing far from the world she lives in today. Kim Dickens’ character is also involved in a serious miscarriage of justice against a Black man. How did you go about threading this into your story, and why?

Milch: Of course, the sisters are at the heart of this show. There’s addiction and the brokenness of families, but class is also a really big part of this show. Oftentimes, these shows are about beautiful, aspirational lives or rich people behaving badly. But it was always incredibly important to us that this was a bit of a sendup of that and taking the piss out of it because it’s inherent to the story and to Nicky as a character who calls things like she sees it. For us, that was so true of race in the show. We were writing Catherine as a character for Lorraine Toussaint from day one. That was just who we had in our mind. For us, everybody in the show has secrets and everybody lies, but there are also a lot of truth tellers. And the idea of being able to name things as they are and call them out for the way that they are, it was so important to us that this family, which, yes, has come from lower class. But these are white women, right? This is a white kid who is going through the criminal justice system. That is going to be a very different experience than a brown or a Black kid. 

To have Gloria Reuben bring Michelle Sanders to life, so we can ask what is her experience and who has she represented before and why it is different and what are the motivations for her to take on a case. And Dom Willis, the prosecutor in the courtroom, who’s amazing. Their dynamic, two Black lawyers in this world of white people and talking about the reality of race, it was just really important to us that people didn’t shy away from calling things out. Lorraine, in particular, was such an incredible partner in bringing that character to life. There was the scene in Episode 5 where she and Nicky are in the kitchen, and we really worked on that scene with her. We had open lines of communication about wanting to get it right and have it feel real.

Corrado: She texted us and just said, “Can we talk?” And I was like, “Oh no.” It was about that scene, but it was so important that we talk because she knows things that we don’t. Tell us and teach us. That was an exciting thing. There’s always a little trepidation because you think, did we mess this up as writers? We want to honor her experience. I thought that was a very interesting journey, that whole scene for us. 

Do you think, if this is where this story ends, these sisters got away with it? They sure are very confident in how they played their cards at the end of this. Yes, they are stronger together, but they have made enemies of some powerful people.

Milch: Yes, they have. This story, the one that we are telling in this season of television, is about these two sisters finding each other and reuniting in truth with one another. In that sense, they get away with it. Outside of that, that may be a different conversation.

Corrado: Chloe settled some debts with her sister. She owed her big time.

Milch: Then they got to a stargaze. This is what we did tonight, as they say. We looked at the Big Dipper. That’s the story we’re telling ourselves.

This interview has been edited and condensed.