Netflix and Prime Video Play Dueling Banjos With Similar Series This Summer

Sometimes, the forces of entertainment media come together to direct our time and energy towards similar stories. Think about the year we got two movies about asteroids destroying the Earth. Or the year The Prestige and The Illusionist were both released.

I don’t know if that happens anymore with theatrical releases, but there are a lot of hours to fill on streaming services. Inevitably, we’ll sometimes get overlap. This year Netflix and Prime Video played a sophisticated game of dueling banjos with some of their programming, pitting Sirens against The Better Sister and We Were Liars against The Waterfront. These shows are two sides of the same coin, the light and dark sides of the same ideas.

Everyone in Sirens was dressed like Easter eggs, the beach vibe was immaculate, and the sunlight felt antiseptic as we followed Devon (Meghann Fahy) from her harried life to fictional Port Haven to find her sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), who she believed needed to be rescued from a potentially murderous cult leader. Simone was embarrassed by her sister and the life she escaped by going to work for wellness influencer Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore). She spends a lot of the show trying, and failing, to keep these two worlds from colliding.

The Better Sister also takes place in an affluent seaside enclave. But, because it’s set in the very real Hamptons, it’s more NYC-coded; the elegance that
was so brightly hued in Sirens was defined by wearing neutral colors and blacks. Power and ambition are dressed differently, but the stories are similar. Estranged sisters who grew up with no one to rely on but themselves are reunited because one came to the aid of the other. Nicky (Elizabeth Banks) was just as much of an embarrassment and liability to her sister (Jessica Biel) as Devon was in Sirens.

Both shows peeled back layers of plot points episodically, like an onion skin. As more details about the sisters’ pasts and relationships were revealed, we learned that histories of substance abuse, parental neglect, and spousal abuse had colored the stories we were watching. The omniscient narrator was unreliable in both shows. It made us question what we had seen or been told in the previous episodes.

In The Better Sister, all the characters who passed through the story, and the red herrings tied to the central mystery, brought the sisters together in the end. They overcame the forces that had been keeping them apart for so many years as a means of self-preservation, deciding it would be better to stick together than to allow one or the other to fall (again).

The ending of Sirens was less satisfying because, instead of uniting the sisters, they were divided by their moral outlooks. When the curtain was pulled back on how corrupt and driven by social status Port Haven was, Devon expected Simone to leave with her and return to the safety of the family home. She was blindsided by her sister’s unvarnished desire for that power and social status, and needed to leave Simone to lie in the messy bed she made for herself. It was a means of preserving her sense of self-worth, divorced from her lifetime of trying to protect Simone.

Both shows explored the complexity of sisterhood in similar ways, with varying outcomes. Both sets of sisters had one who was driven to become powerful, and one whose life was not living up to expectations, unfairly burdened with responsibilities or harmful secrets. The main conflicts between the two sets of sisters were informed by those familial secrets. In Sirens, Devon was principled enough to walk away from the corruption that infected Simone. In The Better Sister, the idea of which sister was actually the better one blurred by the end when they decided to lean into the corruption surrounding them, and consolidated their power to enrich themselves and keep their secrets safe.

Despite cosmetic differences, these shows about sisters had the same lessons to teach us:
Know when to double down on your support and when to cut bait.
If there is an ugly truth to be exposed, respectability and wealth will not protect you.
Men who hide behind that façade of respectability and wealth are rotten at their core.

The Waterfront and We Were Liars both explored the dynamics of privileged white families who were not afraid to break laws or do unscrupulous things to get their way and maintain their power. Harlan Buckley (Holt McCallany) and Harris Sinclair (David Morse) were powerful patriarchs forced to contend with their heirs’ attempts to dismantle the family legacies by recognizing their privilege and distancing themselves from the cycles of classism, racism, and violence that have helped them build empires. Here again, we were shown that the façade of respectability will not protect people from the consequences of their actions when they’re taken for the sake of gaining or maintaining wealth and power.

While the Sinclairs of Beechwood Island in We Were Liars would *gasp* never do anything as gauche as get in bed with drug traffickers, you don’t get to be a member of the Fortune 500 Most Influential People’s list without getting your hands dirty in some way. And while the Buckleys’ fiefdom in The Waterfront may not seem as impressive as a private island, they’ve worked hard to build generational power and won’t let outside interests destroy it without a fight.

Both are insular families who resented the intrusion of outsiders disrupting the status quo.

Especially brown outsiders like Shawn the bartender (Rafael L. Silva) in The Waterfront, revealed to be Harlan’s illegitimate son. Or Ed (Rahul Kohli) and Gat Patil (Shubham Maheshwari) in We Were Liars, who had the gall to fall in love with beautiful, rich, white women. The Buckleys were mostly quick to embrace Shawn because it served their purposes as they went to war against their drug supplier (Topher Grace). The Patils were seen as nothing but inferior beings and potential spoilers of a pure white (and very blonde) bloodline until the very end of We Were Liars.

In both Liars and Waterfront, we saw how the wives of powerful men prop up their husbands, to the detriment of their children’s well-being, for the sake of maintaining their positions of power. And we saw how the effects of putting power and wealth above the emotional and physical health of your family created generational trauma. Sometimes it was through overt violence, like in The Waterfront, where there were shootouts, kidnappings, and murder. Sometimes it was through unintentional violence that bubbles up when you’ve avoided confronting the harm done to you by a family more concerned with appearances than anything else. The fire set by The Liars in We Were Liars got out of control quickly, like a metaphor for the way the Sinclairs handled their problems, oblivious to the harm they were doing until it was too late.

The Waterfront and We Were Liars show us that privilege doesn’t have an unlimited shelf-life. Eventually, someone will want to break the cycle to save themselves. And once the cycle is broken for one member of the family, the rest begin to see how trapped they are and will want to break free as well.

In recent years, we’ve been inundated with stories about wealthy people behaving badly. Succession, Billions, Empire, Big Little Lies, The White Lotus, The Righteous Gemstones, and now these four join that pantheon. I don’t know if there are any lessons to be learned from these shows, though. Sure, there were very real repercussions for how hard the Sinclairs worked to maintain their power in We Were Liars. And if you squint into the future of Sirens, you could Simone would meet a similar end as her predecessors.

But the cycles of lies and violence were perpetuated in The Waterfront and The Better Sister. And there’s no denying that mirrors real life more accurately. We’ve been telling these stories for so long that it’s getting hard to tell them apart, except for their color schemes and minor differences in location, although waterfront property does seem to be the way to go these days. If this is art imitating life, we’ve got a few more years of these stories. If we can get life to imitate art, we might be able to burn away all the façades of wealth, privilege, and respectability like they’re a seaside mansion on a private island.

All episodes of Sirens and The Waterfront are streaming on Netflix.
All episodes of The Better Sister and We Were Liars are streaming on Prime Video.