{"id":310567,"date":"2026-02-21T23:17:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T23:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/310567\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T23:17:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T23:17:11","slug":"irish-television-has-become-a-theme-park-of-throwbacks-and-weird-vibes-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/310567\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish television has become a theme park of throwbacks and weird vibes \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDo you think the vibe is weird in here?\u201d asks Robyn (Sin\u00e9ad Keenan) in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast<\/a>, Lisa McGee\u2019s<\/a> new Netflix<\/a> comedy-mystery caper. Weird vibes are now normal in television shows set in Ireland. As Saoirse-Monica Jackson\u2019s character might say, it would be strange if there weren\u2019t any weird vibes, babes.<\/p>\n

McGee offers a knowing send-up of weird vibe shows, winking at how Irish-flavoured dramas lay national cliches on thick while simultaneously contriving to fudge their sense of time and place.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: An underwhelming and tonally disorienting showOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cLocals\u201d deploy Americanisms such as \u201ctwisters\u201d and \u201cmotels\u201d, then other characters loudly question why. An apparent villain unleashes a sinister-by-numbers whistle to the tune of Molly Malone. Someone exclaims \u201cJesus Christ\u201d mid-argument, but it\u2019s because a giant Jesus statue has materialised on the road. \u201cSure isn\u2019t that how we like to do things?\u201d says a woman disclosing a cover-up \u2013 a risibly vague allusion to Irish scandal that will wash over international viewers.<\/p>\n

In the ultimate \u201chaving your barmbrack and eating it\u201d moment, Dublin manifests as a shamrock-swamped playground for the maniacally drunk, only for the date to be revealed as St Patrick\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

This joke, at once clever and tedious, is the internationalisation of television writ large. It is often necessary to repeat tropes in order to parody them. Still, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast\u2019s overfamiliar milieu remains \u201cIreland as theme park\u201d and, alas, there has been a surfeit of this stuff of late.<\/p>\n

McGee\u2019s high-energy series may be more entertaining than Netflix\u2019s Bodkin<\/a> and Sky\u2019s Small Town, Big Story<\/a> combined, but all three shows share DNA. The world they present is populated by \u201ceejits\u201d, folk-horror archetypes and the last nuns in Ireland to wear habits. A decades-old mystery is twinned with the suggestion that nothing should be taken seriously in a place of such whimsy.<\/p>\n

In Bodkin, American podcaster Gilbert (Will Forte) demands to see the \u201csmall, quaint stuff\u201d. Hamming-it-up locals oblige by talking about fairies 11 minutes in, to the disdain of returning emigrant Dove (Siobh\u00e1n Cullen). A stand-in for the audience, she complains that Gilbert \u201cthinks Ireland is some kind of Disneyland\u201d. The weird vibes are provided by wolves.<\/p>\n

In Small Town, Big Story, returning emigrant Wendy (Christina Hendricks) must contend with eccentric locals while producing a fantasy film called I Am Celt. \u201cF**kin\u2019 Looney Tunes. Every f**kin\u2019 way you look. And why does it not stop raining?\u201d Wendy despairs. The twist is the weird vibes arrive courtesy of aliens. But why is her mother quoting Exodus at her? Is that an Irish thing? It is on TV.<\/p>\n

\"ChristinaChristina Hendricks plays Wendy Patterson in Chris O’Dowd’s Small Town, Big Story. Photograph: Bernard Walsh\/ Small Town Big Story <\/p>\n

There\u2019s more than one way to send a series hurtling into a time warp. RT\u00c9 dramas The Walsh Sisters<\/a> and These Sacred Vows<\/a> are tonally contained compared to their weird vibe cousins. Both are ostensibly set in the here and now. And yet they come off as period pieces in disguise.<\/p>\n

Tenerife-set These Sacred Vows, currently on air, could easily be a Celtic Tiger-era show. It features lots of golf, someone who hasn\u2019t heard of \u201cgaydar\u201d and throwback mentions of \u201cfactor\u201d (suncream). Sandra (Justine Mitchell) explains that she hid her pregnancy from her baby\u2019s father, Vincent (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), because he was training to be a priest \u2013 a plot surely more appropriate for an older generation.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0TV guide: the best new shows to watch, starting tonightOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cHave I opened a door to the past?\u201d asks Helen (Mair\u00e9ad Tyers) in The Walsh Sisters, as Anna (Louisa Harland) listens to A Woman\u2019s Heart (1992). A hoary old reference to Fight Club (1999) receives no such framing. Rehab \u201clooks like somewhere Ozzy Osbourne would stay\u201d. Sanctimonious martyr \u201cMammy Walsh\u201d (Carrie Crowley) bemoans \u201cthe outpouring of cheap ugly flowers\u201d when Princess Diana died as if she\u2019s been ruminating on how awful these were since 1997.<\/p>\n

\u201cMammy Walsh\u201d is not the only middle-aged woman on Irish television to be saddled with attitudes that seem, at best, out of time. I can barely speak about Sheryl (Sophie Thompson), the alcohol-fuelled mother in RT\u00c9-backed comedy SisterS, who lives in TV\u2019s stock \u201cIrish home\u201d \u2013 one laden with religious iconography \u2013 while implying her daughter should be grateful not to have been hit by her ex.<\/p>\n

Is it possible to make a modern show where the characters are Irish, but not stereotypes and not inordinately self-conscious about their accident of birth? Of course. Such a series doesn\u2019t even need to be painfully contemporary to convince.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0RT\u00c9 crime drama Kin is coming back, and based on more recent offerings, it can\u2019t come soon enoughOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Obituary<\/a>, Ray Lawlor\u2019s macabre comedy for RT\u00c9 and Hulu, is set in the fictional \u201cbog-standard backwater\u201d of Kilraven, where we\u2019re told \u201cthere\u2019s a ton of weird stuff going on\u201d. But the similarity to weird-vibes shows ends there. It just gets on with it.<\/p>\n

Elvira (Siobh\u00e1n Cullen), an obituarist driven to murder by poor rates of pay, is a fiendishly smart psychopath pursued by adversaries who are steely, not stupid. Kilraven might be \u201clike a funfair in winter\u201d, but there are no clowns here. No one wanders in from another timeline \u2013 instead, it feels timeless.<\/p>\n

This shouldn\u2019t be so unusual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDo you think the vibe is weird in here?\u201d asks Robyn (Sin\u00e9ad Keenan) in How to Get to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,7241,25798,1868,6085,25801,49957,15640,125732],"class_list":{"0":"post-310567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-laura-slattery","12":"tag-lisa-mcgee","13":"tag-netflix","14":"tag-rte","15":"tag-saoirse-monica-jackson","16":"tag-siobhan-cullen","17":"tag-sky","18":"tag-tom-vaughan-lawlor"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}