{"id":346550,"date":"2026-03-14T21:51:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T21:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/346550\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T21:51:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T21:51:19","slug":"how-to-get-to-heaven-from-belfast-cant-match-the-high-wire-comedy-of-derry-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/346550\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018How to Get to Heaven from Belfast\u2019 can\u2019t match the high-wire comedy of \u2018Derry Girls\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lisa McGee\u2019s bracing British series \u201cDerry Girls,\u201d<\/a> which became a Netflix hit over three seasons starting in 2018<\/a>, laced dark Irish humor into a bubbly teen sitcom, like the TV equivalent of a black and tan (the beer cocktail that\u2019s half stout, half pale ale). Following a quartet of ornery Catholic schoolgirls in Northern Ireland the mid-1990s, it set some familiar youthful rites of passage\u2014around sex, family, pop culture and religion\u2014against the fraught political backdrop of the Troubles, then in their pre-Good Friday Accord twilight but still a source of grievance, division and the occasional bombing.<\/p>\n

Within that context, the show\u2019s brash comic tone was something of a bravura high-wire act, which McGee and a flawless cast pulled off with cheeky aplomb. How disappointing, then, to report that \u201cHow to Get to Heaven From Belfast,\u201d her new series for Netflix, is a wobbly, unsuccessful blend of comedy, mystery and would-be thriller. It has flashes of inspiration and surprise, but they are few and far between in the series\u2019 sprawling eight episodes. In the vivid parlance of the show, it\u2019s not great craic (fun).<\/p>\n

Like \u201cDerry Girls,\u201d \u201cHow to Get to Heaven\u201d is about four Catholic schoolgirls, though we mostly see their high school years in flashback from their middle-aged present. And in this case, the trauma that bonded them wasn\u2019t the Troubles but a murder and its elaborate cover-up when they were still teens. When three of the friends\u2014Saiorse (Roisin Gallagher), Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and Robyn (Sin\u00e9ad Keenan)\u2014reunite as adults for what they\u2019re led to believe is the death of the fourth, Greta (Natasha O\u2019Keeffe), they discover some troubling inconsistencies and embark on a knockabout caper to solve the mystery before a hunky cop, Liam (Darragh Hand), finds out their buried secret.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube<\/p>\n

To start with the positive: Casting director Carla Stronge has found four ideal young actors to play the teen versions of the show\u2019s leads. They\u2019re so good, and their banter so evocative of classic \u201cDerry Girls,\u201d that I often preferred their scenes to the present-day ones. (\u201cShould we be doing drugs by now?\u201d muses one teen to another.) As ever, McGee populates her fictional world with a gallery of lovable oddballs: a cheery but clueless hotelier with an electric bowtie, a longfaced hitwoman with a taste for American country music, a suspicious young gas station clerk in a deerstalker cap, a drily sarcastic head nun at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows (though she is but a faint echo of the peremptory Sister Michael of \u201cDerry Girls\u201d). As with her previous show, there\u2019s plenty of deep-cut religious humor. In one episode, a character hilariously conflates two Biblical accounts into the story of \u201cdoubting Peter,\u201d while another delivers this pithy one-liner: \u201cDNA doesn\u2019t wash off; it\u2019s like Catholicism.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is also a light smattering of show-business parody: Saiorse is the head writer of a popular murder mystery series whose lead actress is trying to wrest control of the show. But Saiorse somehow manages to take an extended break from this purportedly high-stress job to chase down a real-life mystery with her friends, and to stray from her dull fianc\u00e9 into the arms of the aforementioned cop.<\/p>\n

The most promising thread of \u201cHow to Get to Heaven\u201d is about the compromises and constraints its lead characters face as they get older. In various ways, each recognizes they are not quite living the futures they dreamed of when they were a group of relatively carefree teens with the motto \u201cseparate but inseparable.\u201d Indeed, a show all about the many disappointments, absurdities and indignities of mid-life from the creator of \u201cDerry Girls\u201d sounds like great TV.<\/p>\n

Alas, that\u2019s not the show Lisa McGee has made. Instead, she has woven these three into a dizzyingly large cast of characters, amid a convoluted plot about a creepy, decades-long psychological experiment, and the shadowy vigilante cabal that has been dispatched to erase traces of its existence. The problem isn\u2019t just that this tangled story is a poor one, haltingly told. It is that all this vaguely witchy drama makes a very awkward fit with the zany, joshing comic tone that is McGee\u2019s default setting, with her bickering dialogue and pop-rock needle drops. You know something is off when Saoirse-Monica Jackson, the delightfully high-strung Erin on \u201cDerry Girls,\u201d shows up here as a gratingly quirky, pink-haired criminal named Feeney, who punctuates every sentence with the ungrammatical endearment \u201cbabes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, \u201cHow to Get to Heaven\u201d reminded me of the grisly, often compelling Showtime series \u201cYellowjackets,\u201d which told a similarly tortured tale of teen girls covering up a youthful crime, only to have it haunt them in middle age. While that show ultimately fell apart, it started strong, powerfully mixing body horror with teen drama and the occult, and giving equal weight to the heady past and the compromised present. While \u201cHow to Get Heaven From Belfast\u201d has moments in which I admired McGee\u2019s craft\u2014in a brilliant device, a key scene of re-enactment plays out over a secretly taped soundtrack, and the final episode executes a clever twist\u2014there are many more where the seams show and the writer peeks out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re all trying to make sense of something\u2014trying to find light in the dark,\u201d says Liam to Saiorse in a later episode. This isn\u2019t just the kind of nakedly obvious thesis statement that screenwriters should avoid. It also serves as a rough description of the experience of watching \u201cHow to Get to Heaven From Belfast,\u201d in which the mix of light and dark never quite makes sense.<\/p>\n

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