The Sisters Grimm Season 2 Gets More Emotional, Amy Higgins and Michael Buckley Explain Why

The Sisters Grimm may live in a world filled with magic, dragons and familiar fairy-tale faces, but Season 2 isn’t afraid to get messy with the very real emotions underneath all of it.

The TV Cave recently sat down with The Sisters Grimm executive producers Amy Higgins and Michael Buckley to talk about the Apple TV series’ second season, and the conversation quickly moved beyond magical adventures. Season 2 digs further into grief, anger, bullying, trauma and what happens when kids are forced to carry emotions they may not fully understand yet.

That emotional shift is especially clear with Sabrina. She is still carrying the disappearance of her parents, but that pain affects the way she sees the Ever Afters around her. Higgins explained that the season intentionally asks Sabrina and the audience, to wrestle with how trauma can turn into anger toward an entire group rather than the individual people responsible.

“It's easy to want to hate a group rather than an individual,” Higgins said while discussing Sabrina’s mindset.

It is heavier territory than viewers might expect from an animated family series, but that is part of what makes the new season work. The Sisters Grimm isn’t suddenly trying to become something it isn’t. There are still jokes, monsters, magic and plenty of Saturday-morning-cartoon energy, but the characters are being allowed to grow alongside the viewers watching them.

Buckley said that realization began while he was writing the original books. After meeting young readers, he discovered that kids were capable of engaging with much more complicated stories than he initially expected. That experience ultimately gave him permission to push deeper into the characters and their emotional lives, something he said Higgins and Apple supported in adapting the story for television.

The goal, Buckley explained, is to build something that can grow with its audience rather than keeping Sabrina and Daphne emotionally frozen in place. That approach becomes especially noticeable in Season 2, where even characters who appear to be antagonists are given motivations that go beyond simply being “bad.”

One of the season’s more interesting storylines involves bullying, and Higgins talked about how important it was for the series to look beyond the act itself and explore what may be happening with the kids responsible for it. Sabrina is treated terribly, but the series eventually reveals that the children hurting her are carrying their own trauma as well. Higgins hopes that showing those layers can spark conversations for young viewers about how they respond when someone else is hurting them.

That does not mean excusing bad behavior. Instead, the series is interested in asking where that behavior comes from and whether understanding another person’s pain can change how someone chooses to respond.

Buckley described the philosophy behind the characters as making them “three-dimensional in this 2D world.” Even the villains have emotional lives, motivations and reasons for believing they are doing the right thing. For a series rooted in fairy tales, stories historically filled with clearly defined heroes and villains, that little bit of gray makes things considerably more interesting.

The conversation became especially personal when we asked about Sabrina and Daphne’s very different ways of dealing with what has happened to their family. Sabrina tends to hold everything tightly and protect the people around her, while Daphne remains more open, bubbly and willing to let people in. They may be chasing the same goal, but they certainly do not carry the journey in the same way.

Higgins revealed that she lost both of her parents within nine months while the season was in production, giving the story an emotional connection she never could have anticipated. She said the final episodes still bring her to tears, and her own experience with grief helped inform the understanding that people can experience the same loss in completely different ways.

That difference is also central to Sabrina and Daphne’s relationship. Higgins explained that part of Daphne’s ability to remain lighter comes from Sabrina spending so much time protecting her younger sister from things that could hurt her. At the same time, Daphne wishes Sabrina did not feel responsible for carrying so much of that weight herself. It makes their relationship about more than two sisters searching for their parents; it becomes a recognizable story about siblings, family roles and the ways people try to protect one another even when nobody really knows the right way to do it.

There is much more in our full conversation with Higgins and Buckley, including why Season 2 was allowed to become emotionally more complicated, how the creative team approached young characters who are hurting each other, and why The Sisters Grimm refuses to divide everyone neatly into heroes and villains.

Check out our interview below.