Even before Saoirse-Monica Jackson turns up around the halfway point, it’s clear “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” comes from the same sensibility as “Derry Girls,” in which Jackson played anxious teenager Erin Quinn. Not only does the black comedy air on Netflix, where “Derry Girls” became a global sensation after initially airing on the UK’s Channel 4; “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” — heretofore known as just “Belfast,” to reduce my risk of carpal tunnel — also centers on a tightly knit group of Northern Irish girlfriends prone to nervous babbling and rash decisions. But for creator Lisa McGee, here spending some of the capital rightfully acquired from three delightful seasons of “Derry Girls,” “Belfast” is a level up in scale and ambition. (“Belfast” was initially set up at Channel 4 as well, but moved to Netflix due in part to rising production costs.) Adding dual timelines, deadly intrigue and a doubled runtime to the “Derry Girls” blueprint, “Belfast” sometimes strains under the weight of all these extra elements, yet never loses the infectious appeal of the platonic chemistry at its core.
Like McGee herself and the titular “Derry Girls” inspired by her upbringing, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) are alumnae of an all-girls Catholic school that cemented their friendship. (Though the trio are slightly older than Erin and her peers, having attended secondary school in the aughts, post-Good Friday Agreement. The Troubles that formed the background of “Derry Girls” are a recent memory here, but a memory nonetheless.) But they graduated 20 years ago, and have now reached their late 30s in states of varying dissatisfaction. Saoirse is the London-based creator of a hit TV show — a seeming McGee surrogate, apart from the fact that Saoirse hates her schlocky crime drama “Murder Code” and the egocentric actress who leads it. Dara, a closeted lesbian, uses caring for her elderly mother as an excuse to never build a life of her own; Robyn is a wealthy housewife exhausted by her three rambunctious kids.
The missing fourth member of this quartet is Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), who the other three lost touch with after one fateful night 20 years in the past. In the present, when Greta abruptly dies after what her family claims was a freak fall down the stairs, the news threatens to resurface secrets the group has long suppressed. Already on edge when they cross the border into rural County Donegal for Greta’s wake, the girls (this is Ireland, where even grown women nearing 40 are still “girls”) only get more freaked out as events unfold. They were invited by an email from Greta’s sister-in-law, but her widower Owen (Emmett J. Scanlan) doesn’t even have a sister. A friendly Englishman at the local watering hole is a dead ringer for Greta’s ex Jason (Josh Finan), whose unexplained disappearance two decades prior lies at the heart of what the group is hiding. Finally, Saoirse gets a glimpse inside the casket and comes away convinced the body isn’t Greta’s. The premiere’s final reveal confirms the writer isn’t just inventing another story.
A group of Irish women under a high-stakes code of silence recalls Sharon Horgan’s excellent — in Season 1, at least — “Bad Sisters,” down to specific plot beats like an ill-advised flirtation between the engaged Saoirse and Liam (Darragh Hand), a local cop. (The protagonists are certainly close and quarrelsome enough to pass for siblings.) But McGee’s voice, even when distributed across a writers’ room in another shift from “Derry Girls,” is distinctive enough that “Belfast” exists outside the prior show’s shadow. The tensions among Robyn, Dara and Saoirse are especially well-drawn; the women call each other out for Robyn’s self-absorption, Dara’s cowardice and Saoirse’s unseemly appetite for excitement as only old friends can. The performances, too, are each revelations in their own right. Gallagher’s flustered charm, Keenan’s shameless hauteur and Dunne’s elastic face all keep the laughs coming, even as their characters are more jaded and downtrodden than the teens they once were.
Greta, by design, remains more obscure. Some of this fuzziness is pointed: Ireland is the kind of place where someone is still known as “the transfer student” two years after they turn up at school, marking Greta (played in flashbacks by an ethereal Emma Canning) as an outsider even before she gets into trouble. But because “Belfast” spends so much less time with her, the late-breaking revelations about her past and its consequences don’t land with the same force as her peers’ more steadily constructed portraits. We understand so little about who Greta’s become in the present day that she never comes into focus as more than the target of the actual main characters’ projection. The finale includes a brief clip of a pre-disappearance Greta developing photos in a darkroom. She’s a photographer, a neat detail that goes unmentioned until it’s too late to explore what it says about her adult life.
Saoirse and company quickly cross paths with a menacing fixer known as Booker (Bronagh Gallagher), who seems suspicious even before we see Greta tied up in her trunk. By season’s end, we’re being filled in on a nesting doll of intrigue: who Booker works for, who the body is it if isn’t Greta’s, what happened to Greta in the 2020s, what happened between Greta and Jason in the 2000s, what happened to Greta as a small child in the 1990s that led her to Our Lady of the Sorrows Cottage, and what all of this has to do with a creepy symbol all four got tattooed on their bodies at Greta’s insistence. It’s a lot to keep track of, and to be honest, I wasn’t half as hooked by any of it as I was by simply watching the actors bounce off one another. When the final shot telegraphed hopes for a Season 2, it’s them I was looking forward to seeing more of, rather than a resolution to a cliffhanger — the takeaway being that I am looking forward to more.
“Belfast” builds to a resolution that leans a little too heavily on the now well-worn conventions of the trauma plot. However trope-laden the payoff may be, it’s countered by the specificity and sense of place McGee builds on both sides of the line dividing Ireland in two. Critical scenes hinge on the use and meaning of the Irish language, Catholicism suffuses everything, and the long hangovers of the Troubles and abortion bans are still in effect, even if the original causes are not. “Derry Girls” mined comic gold from the ordinary lives led amid geopolitical turmoil; “Belfast” carries that tradition forward into its aftermath, tinged with the hindsight and regrets of adulthood.
All eight episodes of “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” are now streaming on Netflix.