In Lisa McGee’s show “Derry Girls,” about a group of teen-agers growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the threat of violence—in the form of car bombings and street riots—was portrayed as so commonplace that it became, effectively, a nuisance. It wasn’t just terrifying; it was annoying, getting in the way of salon appointments and nights out. In the pilot episode, the friends are on their way to school when armed British soldiers board the bus they’re on at a vehicle checkpoint. Waiting for them to finish, one girl yawns, while another ogles the uniformed men. “Do you think if I told them I had an incendiary device down my knickers, he’d have a look?” she says. “Some of them are rides!”
Much of the comedy of “Derry Girls,” which became a surprise smash hit on Netflix, derived from this juxtaposition: the mundane—a school ride—and the unthinkable. The main character, Erin, and her friends are animated by schemes that have nothing to do with the turbulent times in which they happen to live. They want to meet boys. They want to ditch class. They want to wear jean jackets instead of school blazers and learn how to smoke. It is part of the charm of the show that the habits and wayward desires of teen-age girls—their in-jokes and obsessions, the everyday indignities of adolescence—are foregrounded rather than trivialized, even against the backdrop of serious sectarian violence. Girls just want to be girls, without having to worry about explosions.
If violence was ambient background noise in “Derry Girls,” it has come front and center, albeit in a more cartoonish fashion, in McGee’s new show, “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.” The eight-episode comedic murder mystery, which premièred on Netflix earlier this month, and quickly gained a following in the U.K., shares some similarities with McGee’s previous project. Once again, we are mostly in Northern Ireland with a tight-knit gang of girlfriends who wind one another up and hatch plans in rapid-fire dialogue. This time, however, we are in present-day Belfast, and the girls are grownups: thirtysomething women who were closest when they attended Catholic school together, twenty years earlier. Back then, they were inseparable and—maybe, possibly—did something one dark night in the woods that none of them has been able to forget.
Since that evening, their lives have gone in vastly different directions. There’s Saoirse, played by Roisin Gallagher, a successful television writer for a popular crime show called “Murder Code” who’s on the verge of burnout. (“I wanted to write plays. What happened?” she says acidly, after an awkward lunch with the show’s bratty star, Marnie. “You realized you’d need to buy stuff,” one of her colleagues replies.) Robyn, played by Sinéad Keenan, is a wealthy, stressed-out mother of three boys, who says things like “You can be in bits and have your highlights done. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.” Dara, played by the delightfully expressive Caoilfhionn Dunne, has given up most things to care for her aging mother. The three women reunite to attend the wake of their estranged school friend, Greta, played by Natasha O’Keeffe, once the fourth in their gang. When they arrive at Greta’s home, however, the vibe is off, and not just because the friends are hungover. Saoirse decides to open the casket to slip a photo inside and—wouldn’t you know it—the body’s not Greta’s.