Inside a New Series From David Milch’s Daughters

The Better Sister tells two stories about two different sets of siblings, one fictional, one real. Officially, the Prime Video series (premiering May 29) is an adaptation of the 2019 novel by Alafair Burke, about a pair of estranged siblings, played by Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, reuniting when one’s husband is murdered. But it’s also a way for the show’s creator, Olivia Milch, to work through the family dynamics with her own sister, Elizabeth Milch (who’s also a Better Sister producer), and their dad David Milch, the brilliant but troubled mind behind all-time classic dramas Deadwood and NYPD Blue. 

In the story, the father of Biel’s Chloe and Banks’ Nikki was a drunk who sobered up before his younger daughter Chloe was old enough to be aware of the worst of his behavior. Perhaps not coincidentally, Chloe has grown up to be a celebrated journalist and activist, while Nikki is a recovering addict whose son has been raised by Chloe. Similarly, David Milch suffered through multiple addictions, including heroin and gambling, but got sober by the time Olivia was 10, while Elizabeth was 15. (“Ding, ding, ding — I don’t know why I connected with that!” Olivia jokes of the material.) The siblings’ personalities — along with their brother Ben, who like Elizabeth has vivid memories of when his father was using — were shaped accordingly. 

Olivia, 36, is a firecracker. She makes her presence felt entering any part of The Better Sister set in Queens, asking each member of the crew what’s happening with them and enthusing about their work. Elizabeth is friendly and warm, but not as boisterous as Olivia. During the most tumultuous part of her childhood, she says, “it probably felt useful for me to be quiet and watchful, to know what a given day would be like and how best to fit into it.”  

Both women were drawn to their father’s work as kids. At six, Elizabeth visited the set of her David’s short-lived Capitol News and declared, “I’m going to come to work with you every day I have off from school.” Olivia’s earliest childhood memories are of being on the set of NYPD Blue. She jokes that the smell of a soundstage is like Proust’s madeleines to her. 

As a self-described “very proud nepo baby,” Olivia has brought various pieces of her father’s past into Better Sister. She hired Regina Corrado, who wrote for David on Deadwood and his inscrutable follow-up series, John From Cincinnati, as her co-showrunner. The supporting cast includes three Deadwood alums: Kim Dickens as the cop assigned to the murder, Michael Harney as Chloe’s loyal doorman, and Keone Young as a private investigator. There are other, subtler links, like a scene where Nikki imagines meeting with her late father in a bar, modeled on (and quoting from) an NYPD Blue scene where Detective Sipowicz dreamed of a similar encounter with his dead son. 

The entire production is laden with Milch family Easter eggs both intentional and accidental. The walls of Chloe’s luxurious apartment are lined with paintings by Olivia and Elizabeth’s mother Rita. (“Their mother, as an artist, is staggeringly good,” says Biel.) Production designer Ford Wheeler unwittingly designed Nikki’s pool house in the Hamptons to resemble a guest house David and Rita used to have. Also a coincidence: In the set where Nikki attends AA meetings, Wheeler hung a sign that reads, “Keep your side of the street clean” — which, Olivia explains, “was one of the most oft-said phrases in our home growing up.” 

But some Milchian hallmarks Olivia was not keen to tap. David Milch sets were chaotic by nature. Scripts for individual scenes often weren’t completed until hours before they were filmed — with actors still expected to be precise with David’s distinct language, and even punctuation, despite the lack of prep time. This slowed the process so much that Dickens remembers “looking at call sheets that would say ‘Day 17 of 11,’ and ‘TBD’ for the script pages.” The Better Sister production was both more organized and more relaxed: no monologues being penned at the last possible second, and while Olivia, like her father, cares deeply about dialogue being delivered with the proper meter, she’s less rigid about the words themselves. 

“People who were on the set of Deadwood said they would have paid the cost of admission to be there,” she says, “but that’s tough to put people through. Growing up with that environment, sometimes you think, ‘Maybe I don’t want to replicate that.’” As Deadwood alum W. Earl Brown puts it, “You see elements of David in Olivia. But she doesn’t seem to have let it destroy her, like David did.”

Olivia also knows that at least part of the reason her father, who has been battling Alzheimer’s for the last decade, got away with his unpredictable behavior was, “to put it quite bluntly, he was a man.” By contrast, she created a set with “a super-feminine energy,” as Biel describes it. “You just felt like you were in your mom’s kitchen. ‘Do you need a chai tea? Do you need to go to the bathroom?’ It was a very warm environment.” 

Life with David Milch was, if memorable, much less reassuring. Trips to the track could be an emotional roller coaster for anyone who came along to watch him play the ponies. Corrado remembers a day when Milch won $90,000, and drove away with it “in a paper bag in the back of the car. He gave it to me at home. It just seemed very surreal.” The track could feel like a playground for the kids when he won, but Olivia describes his losing days as “terrifying.” On the drive home, she says, “you just felt how upset [he was], the intensity.” Still, David’s love of games of chance also led to a tradition that the Milch sisters have been happy to continue: buying lottery tickets for the cast and crew. 

That family spirit of generosity also extends to how they treat even seemingly minor characters. The Better Sister has a mystery as its narrative spine, but it treats every supporting player as a person rather than a plot functionary. “None of the characters are utilitarian,” says Dickens. “They’re all so well drawn, and lots of texture, and that sort of has that same feel [as Deadwood].” 

The show saves its biggest gifts for its two fictional siblings. Amid the darkness of both the murder mystery and Nikki and Chloe’s shared past, Banks and Biel have great chemistry and a vivid, complex relationship. They’re also really funny together, which is much more expected from Banks than Biel, who usually plays the straight woman when she does comedies. 

Though the Milches felt the most direct autobiographical connection to the material, the stars didn’t have to look very hard to find their own parallels. Biel says of Chloe, “Her experience is different than my experience,” but there are certain lines that are easy to draw between these two polished, glamorous celebrities, with high-profile marriages, whose every move is under intense public scrutiny. “I watch my friends in this business who go through it,” Biel says. “I felt like I had a lot of things I could pull from my personal life regarding that.” 

Banks is the oldest of four, and describes some of her past films, like Pitch Perfect and Charlie’s Angels, as “me working out in my art one of the most important relationships to me, which is sisterhood.” Like the Milches, she knows what it’s like to have a very different childhood from her siblings: “My parents split up after I went to college. My baby brother has divorced parents, which is not my experience at all.” She also was drawn to the project because she has several loved ones in AA. 

So does Corrado, who’s the youngest of nine, but who has become close enough with her mentor’s clan that she once asked herself, “Why do I feel like an orphan? I have such a big family. But I want to be in the Milch family.” However welcome she feels around them, she also has no illusions about her pecking order relative to Olivia and Elizabeth. “I knew that the sisters, I could never get between them,” she says. 

The Milch sisters remain so tight that on the last day of filming, Olivia stood up to thank the cast and crew and, says Dickens, “could barely get out the words thanking her older sister. All she wanted to do was make her proud.” That older sister sees another parallel between Olivia and one of the siblings she wrote for this show. Olivia and Chloe, Elizabeth explains, “have the fixer mentality. Anything that comes up, they both are like, ‘There’s clearly a right way to do this, and I can make sure it happens, and why don’t you just let me handle it.’ They’re both 100 percent right, but also you want to say, as a protective older sister, ‘Or you could let other people try to do things, and who knows how it would go?’”

“But why,” Olivia asks, grinning, “would we ever want to find out?”