‘The Better Sister’ Stars Break Down Finale’s Major Twist — Will There Be a Season 2? (VIDEO)

Kelli Boyle May 30, 2025, 2:35 am

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[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Better Sister Season 1 finale.]

Prime Video‘s The Better Sister debuted its full eight-episode season on May 29, delivering a family drama full of unexpected twists that were part of the Alafair Burke novel on which its based as well as its own changes to the source material. In the video interview above, stars Jessica Biel, Elizabeth Banks, Gloria Reuben, Corey Stoll, Lorraine Toussaint, and more break down that ending twist, what it means, and how we got there. The show is billed as a limited series, and this season covered the book plot in full, but The Better Sister finale left the door wide open for more mysteries to be solved. The showrunners and stars also address the possibility of a second season in the video above.

The Better Sister, based on the novel by bestselling author Alafair Burke, is an eight-episode electric thriller about the terrible things that drive sisters apart and ultimately bring them back together. Chloe (Jessica Biel), a high-profile media executive, lives a picturesque life with her handsome lawyer husband Adam (Corey Stoll) and teenage son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) by her side while her estranged sister Nicky (Elizabeth Banks) struggles to make ends meet and stay clean. When Adam is brutally murdered, the prime suspect sends shockwaves through the family, reuniting the two sisters, as they try to untangle a complicated family history to discover the truth behind his death.

Here’s the twist on which the whole show is based: Nicky was married to Adam first, and Ethan is her biological son. As revealed midway through the series, there was an incident when Ethan was a toddler that nearly led to his death. Nicky’s struggles with substance abuse were blamed. Adam eventually divorced her and got sole custody of Ethan, and then he became romantically involved with Nicky’s younger sister. The series later reveals that Adam was physically abusing Nicky and also framed her for the pool accident. Nicky wasn’t so high that she nearly let her baby and herself drown in their backyard pool; Adam drugged her drink and made it look like it was her fault. And Chloe, because of personal biases against Nicky rooted in their childhood trauma (and information withheld from her by her family), believed Nicky was to blame. Chloe ended up raising her nephew as her own son, and she and Adam didn’t tell anyone in their new, high-profile life in New York that Ethan’s biological mother was Chloe’s own sister.

Jessica Biel, Elizabeth Banks in 'The Better Sister'

Jojo Whilden / Prime Video

One of the climactic moments of the book is Ethan’s trial for his father’s murder. The trial is depicted near the end of the season, though not the very end so as to leave room for the reveal of Adam’s true killer and the fallout of that revelation. The trial brought with it the bombshell reveal that Adam was physically abusing Chloe, something she kept secret until taking the stand. But Ethan knew about it because he witnessed it, which led to him reconnecting with Nicky to ask for help. Nicky returned to her sister’s life because Adam abused her, too, and she couldn’t stomach the idea of Adam getting away with it again.

'The Better Sister': What to Know About Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks' New Drama

Just like in the book, Nicky is revealed to be Adam’s killer in The Better Sister finale. But there’s another death in the finale’s final seconds that was not in the book at all. Jake (Gabriel Sloyer), Chloe’s lover, was shown dead on a beach as the episode concluded. How he died and who did it are left up in the air, leaving questions about the possibility of a Season 2. Showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado tell TV Insider that it serves as a culmination of the Gentry Group plot line, a way to solidify just how dangerous this group that Adam and Jake found themselves fighting really were.

“There’s so much drama and intrigue at play around Adam as a figure in terms of what he was doing with Gentry Group, in terms of what he was doing with Bill Braddock. And Jake is wrapped up in all of that in terms of this FBI investigation,” Milch explains. “And so the truth is, even though this is a story that starts about this family, it really has expanded out to what is a multinational global company that has huge implications. And so Jake is not only involved with these sisters, he’s involved with that much larger and obviously much more powerful organization. And so for us, it felt like it’s not only this family, the tension and destruction that has occurred of this family, it’s the ripple effect of the tension and destruction that has occurred when people are making these kinds of choices and engaging in this kind of violence. And so it felt inauthentic and insincere to us to say that the violence stops with the sisters, it’s just Nicky who’s doing it. No, this is violence that’s being perpetrated on a much larger and much wider scale.”

“And it was the ambiguity of how did it happen, by his own hand, by someone else’s hand, how dangerous a world are they in, that to me, just in that one visual tells a whole lot of story,” adds Corrado.

“I think it satisfies the first season beautifully,” Corrado says of wrapping the story on a new murder mystery. “All these things are tied up in a way, if you want to think that way. But there’s always, because life is continuous, the, oh wow, we could actually do something with that. But I think that for this particular story, it felt like a period to us.”

Learn more about The Better Sister‘s ending from the stars in the full video interview above.

The Better Sister, Available Now, Prime Video