Lisa McGee On Netflix’s ‘How To Get To Heaven From Belfast’ & ‘Derry Girls’

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is “wish fulfilment” for creator Lisa McGee.

“I’d love to go on one of these adventures with my friends,” McGee told Deadline at London’s Langham Hotel a day before the Netflix comedy thriller launched. “I’d love to solve a mystery. I think a lot of women are really into true crime and I just thought, ‘Well I’ll never get a chance to solve a mystery so let’s write a show instead’.”

McGee tells us she “hoovers” up true crime, which she believes has traditionally been viewed as a male-dominated genre but in fact is beloved by women around the world. Her favorites include S-Town from the producers of Serial, Sweet Bobby and West Cork.

A deep love of true crime came in handy when McGee put together How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. Starring Roisin Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne, who McGee said had “ensemble chemistry” and “perfectly hit the right tone,” the show follows clever, chaotic TV writer Saoirse, glamorous, stressed-out mother of three Robyn, and dependable, inhibited carer Dara, who have been a tight-knit group since school. Now in their late 30s, they are about to embark on the most thrilling adventure of their lives. When an email arrives, telling them about the death of the estranged fourth member of their childhood gang, a series of eerie events at her wake set them on an odyssey through Ireland and beyond.

“To walk that line as an actor and go from the really stupid stuff to the more emotional stuff is so hard,” McGee said of the main cast. “They sell everything. They sell the stupid bits and they sell the really sad bits.”

A “creepy experience at school”

McGee’s hit Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls is based on the Northern Irish scribe’s teenage years and, while she jokes that she is “narcissistic” and finds it “really hard not to put myself in a story,” How to Get to Heaven also draws from her younger day, this time a “creepy experience at school.”

“My old school moved buildings and the old one which had been a convent was left empty,” she added. “I’d heard this was now a place where ghosthunters go and asked my husband to drive me and it looked like a zombie apocalypse. I was walking down a path all overgrown and I just had this feeling I was going to bump into myself as a teenager. I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s quite a cool, creepy idea’.”

The How to Get to Heaven character Saoirse, who writes a fictional detective show called Murder Code, is therefore loosely based on McGee, while her two friends are based on the creator’s real life besties.

“[Saoirse] was the first character I wrote and it was an easy way in. But she’s much more complicated and interesting than I am, which is always the way.”

McGee started writing the How to Get to Heaven pilot before the third and final season of Derry Girls – one of the most watched and critically acclaimed British and Irish comedies of a generation – had even filmed. “I needed to write this because I needed to write something that wasn’t Derry Girls,” she added. “I needed [the Derry Girls characters] to stop talking in my head.”

One might think creating a big budget Netflix series would be trickier than a Channel 4 sitcom but McGee, who oversaw a writers’ room for the first time on How to Get to Heaven but wrote Derry Girls solo, is adamant that the latter was more difficult.

“Derry Girls is really tough to write,” she added. “Writing a sitcom where no one learns anything and these characters don’t really develop until the very end is really tough. I couldn’t spin anything to the end of the next episode. With How to Get to Heaven you can leave something for episode five.”

McGee wrote the first three How to Get to Heaven eps but enlisted her writers’ room for the middle blocks. While acknowledging writers’ rooms are less in vogue in the UK, McGee loved it. The Great writer Ava Pickett provided “gorgeous emotional range,” Bronágh Taggart (Blue Lights) specialized in the “this is too stupid” moments and Tobias Beer (The Deceived), McGee’s husband, brought some horror chops.

McGee said: “For Derry Girls I didn’t have that and that was fine because it was so personal, but this is the way I’d want to do it from now on – it’s better having other writers.”

The “personal” nature of her recent shows comes in part from McGee’s youth growing up in the Irish Troubles, which is of course central to Derry Girls and rears its head “thematically” in How to Get to Heaven, which is about “how you manage the past” and “ghosts,” she explained.

“The echo of The Troubles is always there,” added McGee. “The characters are from there so I guess it’s there in the subtext.”

McGee has no qualms with introducing this “subtext” into her comedy. “I think it’s a lovely bonus,” she added. “[Northern Irish writers] have this extra layer of stuff that we don’t have to work hard for. I think it’s amazing for comedy.”

Switching from Channel 4 to Netflix

McGee forged How to Get to Heaven with a small team at regular producing partner Hat Trick and she is full of praise for Netflix, which “didn’t interfere” apart from providing an “outside eye” on certain scenes, and of course offering up a handsome budget.

But How to Get to Heaven’s journey is an unusual one. In what was an incredibly rare occurence, Channel 4 announced How to Get to Heaven before the show switched to Netflix, with Channel 4 citing “changes in editorial direction as the development process progressed, coupled with rising costs and the recent cooling in the U.S. co-production market.” That news came just after the U.S. writers strike, when getting British and Irish drama to screen was harder than it had ever been.

“It was a really bad time,” said McGee. “This traditional way of making a TV show [via a broadcaster] just stopped overnight. When I started writing the pilot I didn’t really know where it was going and then quite quickly myself and [EP] Liz [Lewin] realized the scale of it was different and it wasn’t a Channel 4 show. If I was to go back I would work that out earlier, but I didn’t know what way the story was going to go.”

McGee stresses that the show was only on spec and wasn’t technically in development with Channel 4 when it switched. She says Netflix was “100% the right place for this show” but would love to work with Channel 4 soon. Luckily for McGee, Channel 4 comedy boss Charlie Perkins recently told us: “Our relationship with Lisa is still so strong. Life is long and hopefully we’ll do something else together.”

Percolating next in McGee’s mind is a comedy mockumentary idea – after Catherine O’Hara’s death, she went back and watched mid-1990s American comedy Waiting for Guffman – along with a second season of How to Get to Heaven, which she has already started thinking about.

“I’ve left it open for a second series but it’s all completely down to how many people watch,” she added. “I’d love to do one.”

Hopefully, McGee gets her second dose of “wish fulfilment” sometime soon.

How to Get to Heaven launches today on Netflix worldwide.