If you’re going to make a show about a big, volatile clan slowly blowing itself apart, you could do worse than hiring a guy who literally grew up as the only boy in a family of seven sisters. That’s the energy Will Arbery is bringing to “Seven Sisters,” the new FX family drama that just scored a series order at FX and will stream on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally.
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The series, led by Elizabeth Olsen, Cristin Milioti and J. Smith-Cameron, hails from Arbery — the playwright and “Succession” writer behind “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” — along with executive producers Garrett Basch and Sean Durkin, who also directed the pilot. FX is billing it as “bold” and “fearless” genre-adjacent storytelling, which essentially translates to domestic drama with a lurking, possibly supernatural edge, rather than another straight-up ghost show.
The hook is simple and creepy. In “Seven Sisters,” a large, tight-knit family begins to unravel when one sister starts communing with a voice no one else can hear, forcing everyone to confront long-buried secrets they’ve spent a lifetime avoiding. It’s the kind of premise that lets Arbery do what he does best — weaponize dinner-table conversation and Catholic guilt — while giving FX a new entry in its long line of psychological, slow-burn dramas.
Anchored by Olsen, Milioti, and Smith-Cameron, the show features an ensemble that already feels like a full-on repertory company, with Anthony Edwards, Meredith Hagner, Odessa Young, Zoë Winters, Bridget Brown, Carolyn Kettig, Philip Ettinger, and Ryan Eggold all co-starring. Previous reports have pegged Olsen as the sister who hears the voice, with Milioti playing another sibling and Edwards and Smith-Cameron as the family’s patriarch and matriarch. In contrast, Eggold plays the husband of Olsen’s character, a former addict who now mines his past on a popular podcast.
Behind the camera, Arbery’s résumé is precisely the kind of thing that makes sense for FX. Onstage, he’s known for knotty, talky plays like “Heroes of the Fourth Turning”; on TV, he recently wrote on the fourth season of “Succession,” winning a WGA Award for episodic drama. “Seven Sisters” has clearly been a priority for a while — it started life as an FX pilot, shot in Vancouver with Durkin at the helm, before today’s full series pickup.
Durkin brings his own history to the project, reuniting with Olsen after their breakout collaboration on “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and riding the renewed attention from “The Iron Claw” and his work on shows like “Dead Ringers”. Basch, meanwhile, has become one of FX’s core producing voices via “Devs,” “Reservation Dogs,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” and more, which makes “Seven Sisters” feel like another brick in that long-running partnership rather than a one-off experiment.
Taken with Arbery’s very personal biography — again, he literally grew up as the only boy among seven sisters in a profoundly religious Texas family — “Seven Sisters” feels like the kind of “write what you know, then make it weirder” project FX loves to sit with for a few seasons if the audience shows up. If nothing else, a haunted-sibling drama from the guy who turned Wyoming conservatives into Greek-chorus tragedy figures and the director who put Olsen through one of the most unsettling performances of the 2010s suggests a series where the scariest thing might not be the voice in your ear — it’s the people who already know exactly how to hurt you.
