The Chicken Sisters review: Down home mess that struggles to delight

The Chicken Sisters, Hallmark+'s first original scripted series, has made its debut and, while Hallmark's core audience may give the show a chance, it's not an immediate winner.

The drama, based on the novel by KJ Dell’Antonia, follows two feuding chicken restaurants. There's Frannie's, a polished establishment that has the makings for a franchise if they just had the capital. And Mimi's, comparatively a hole in the wall that's referred to as a "shack." Some mighty good chicken is served there but the restaurant hasn't modernized.

The crux of the story centers on what happens after Amanda Moore Hillier (Schuyler Fisk) decides to apply for Ultimate Kitchen Clash, a cooking competition that pits two rival eateries against each other in a fight for $100,000. Amanda does so on a whim after yet another night being dismissed by her husband Frank Hillier Jr. (James Kot). To her surprise, Frannie's and Mimi's are selected to be on the show and her impulse manages to spark a bucket load of drama.

See, Amanda was raised a Mimi's girl. The restaurant is run by her mom, Augusta "Gus" Moore (Wendie Malick), a gruff woman whose love is mostly felt through the food she cooks. Gus has an antagonistic relationship with Amanda not only because her daughter is a vegetarian but also because she married a Hillier, a sworn enemy of their family since Frank is the heir to Frannie's.

As such Gus won't do the competition unless Mae (Genevieve Angelson), the daughter that put the town of Merinac in her rearview mirror and didn't look back, comes to help her. Initially, Mae said no with fervor when Amanda called her. She's stripped her voice of her Southern accent and is a reality home improvement star who lives in the city with a fiancé who knows little about her upbringing, so she didn't want to disrupt the carefully constructed life she'd built for herself. But then Mae got fired for being blunt and mean when working with clients.

If The Chicken Sisters focused on this family drama particularly since Nancy Hillier (Lea Thompson) sees Amanda as the daughter she never had and Gus isn't too keen on her, perhaps its story would be tighter. Instead, the series wants you to be invested in every little dust-up, nitpick, and tense interaction between all the characters. There's no real place to rest easy.

Amanda and Frank have a dead marriage because he's used to being babied and getting what he wants. Her relationship with her daughter Frankie (Cassandra Sawtell) is contentious since they don't see eye-to-eye and Amanda resents that her child idolizes Mae. Amanda, as Hallmark is wont to do, has a vibe going on with Mimi's cook Sergio (Ektor Rivera) that everyone is picking up on.

Mae is lying to her fiancé, she's got bad blood with Sabrina Skye (Rukiya Bernard), the host of Ultimate Kitchen Clash, and has reunited with her childhood best friend Kenneth (Jake Foy) who now runs the inn with his husband Patrick (Andrew J. Hampton) after having moved back to town because his mom got sick and later passed away. And this is only the tip of the iceberg that's revealed in the first two episodes.

The Chicken Sisters is stuffed full of conflict, too full. The show is interested in exploring family dynamics but it does so in a way that's hard to truly latch onto and in some ways is dated. There's nothing wrong with walking down well-trodden road as long as you have something new to say or that resonates uniquely or captures your attention in a thought-provoking way.

But this show doesn't do that in its opening salvo. We've seen the resentment that brews between two sisters when one leaves and the other stays. Nancy's burgeoning self-discovery in the wake of her husband's death as she relinquishes the idea of the "right type of woman" and her son fights her tooth-and-nail over it, has been done and done better. As has the gruff mom who struggles to express her feelings but who is actually carrying a lot of hurt over mistakes made in the past.

The only difference here is that the story is Southern fried and when the townsfolk start talking about people, you really do feel like you're sitting on your front porch sipping lemonade listening to someone say something they shouldn't about a neighbor. There's a charm to that bit of the story that will bring a smile to your face but it doesn't buoy the overall plot.

Perhaps the show finds its sea legs the further the story progresses but, with The Chicken Sisters being a weekly release on Hallmark+, that means viewers will have to continue watching in the hope that it can hook them. In this day and age, with so much available to stream, there's just not enough incentive to hold out for a series if it doesn't grab you from the beginning.

What do you think about The Chicken Sisters? Let us know on X and stay tuned to Hidden Remote for more TV news and coverage.