Lisa McGee’s bracing British series “Derry Girls,” which became a Netflix hit over three seasons starting in 2018, laced dark Irish humor into a bubbly teen sitcom, like the TV equivalent of a black and tan (the beer cocktail that’s 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—around sex, family, pop culture and religion—against 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.
Within that context, the show’s 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 “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast,” 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’ sprawling eight episodes. In the vivid parlance of the show, it’s not great craic (fun).
Like “Derry Girls,” “How to Get to Heaven” 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’t the Troubles but a murder and its elaborate cover-up when they were still teens. When three of the friends—Saiorse (Roisin Gallagher), Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and Robyn (Sinéad Keenan)—reunite as adults for what they’re led to believe is the death of the fourth, Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), 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.
To start with the positive: Casting director Carla Stronge has found four ideal young actors to play the teen versions of the show’s leads. They’re so good, and their banter so evocative of classic “Derry Girls,” that I often preferred their scenes to the present-day ones. (“Should we be doing drugs by now?” 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 “Derry Girls”). As with her previous show, there’s plenty of deep-cut religious humor. In one episode, a character hilariously conflates two Biblical accounts into the story of “doubting Peter,” while another delivers this pithy one-liner: “DNA doesn’t wash off; it’s like Catholicism.”
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 fiancé into the arms of the aforementioned cop.
The most promising thread of “How to Get to Heaven” 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 “separate but inseparable.” Indeed, a show all about the many disappointments, absurdities and indignities of mid-life from the creator of “Derry Girls” sounds like great TV.
Alas, that’s 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’t 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’s 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 “Derry Girls,” shows up here as a gratingly quirky, pink-haired criminal named Feeney, who punctuates every sentence with the ungrammatical endearment “babes.”
Ultimately, “How to Get to Heaven” reminded me of the grisly, often compelling Showtime series “Yellowjackets,” 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 “How to Get Heaven From Belfast” has moments in which I admired McGee’s craft—in a brilliant device, a key scene of re-enactment plays out over a secretly taped soundtrack, and the final episode executes a clever twist—there are many more where the seams show and the writer peeks out.
“We’re all trying to make sense of something—trying to find light in the dark,” says Liam to Saiorse in a later episode. This isn’t just the kind of nakedly obvious thesis statement that screenwriters should avoid. It also serves as a rough description of the experience of watching “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast,” in which the mix of light and dark never quite makes sense.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts