Lisa McGee tells it like a ghost story. The “Derry Girls” creator was back home in Derry, Northern Ireland, when the show was becoming an international hit, and she had trekked to the abandoned convent that was once her primary school. It was like stepping back in time: halls frozen in stillness, forgotten scarves, vines snaked over blackboards that were still scrawled with chalk. It was as if the students had simply stood up one day and walked out.
“I just had this feeling, ‘I’m going to bump into schoolgirl me,” she recalled in an interview last week. (As if straight out of the “Derry Girls” writers’ room, the poignant moment was interrupted by a nun, who chirped at her for trespassing.)
Years later, she has used those convent ruins as a key backdrop for “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast,” a zany murder mystery that debuts Thursday on Netflix. The show follows three millennial women who were childhood besties — Robyn, Saoirse and Dara — as they investigate the untimely death of their estranged fourth muskateer, Greta. Across a galloping eight episodes, the gang encounters a whole host of zany obstacles and characters — and the universal, painful question of what we owe our younger selves.
“I really wanted to do our ‘Murder, She Wrote’ kind of thing,” said McGee, 45, who grew up transfixed by American sitcoms and murder mysteries. “I’ve always wanted to do that and do it kind of our way, here — and with three women who aren’t good at it.”
For those looking in from a distance, the word Belfast can conjure a grim backdrop of car bombs, sectarian violence and “the Troubles,” the decades-long conflict that has been the primary lens through which international audiences view the northern half of the island of Ireland. But McGee has not simply recreated her winning, Troubles-related “Derry Girls” formula.
Instead, “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast” is almost petulantly contemporary, a demand from McGee and company that audiences recognize the island not as a romanticized or distant ancestral home, but as a place that is as diverse, complicated and unreconciled as anywhere else.
“I think there can’t be any really complete separation from it,” McGee said of the conflict, whose legacy persists even in a show set outside it. But, she added, “There’s other stories to tell here as well, particularly with female characters.”
“How to Get to Heaven From Belfast” also casts off some other outdated Irish stereotypes. Its characters are diverse in race and sexual orientation, and there are few flat caps, little tweed and hardly any Guinness. A single display of gauche St. Patrick’s Day festivities is more nuisance than celebration, and jokes about the Irish Republican Army — aka “the ’Ra” — are rare, but hilarious when they land.
If the shadow of the conflict lingers, it is through contemporary absurdities that McGee weaves in masterfully. Some of her strongest comedic bits are on the mind-melting, mundane annoyances borne by residents of a place that is two countries — or one divided, depending on who’s describing it. (“Damn it,” Sinéad Keenan’s Robyn laments after crossing the border into the Republic of Ireland, “I forgot my euro purse.”)
One key scene in the show makes poignant use of the Irish language — which was outlawed by colonizing British forces for centuries and has been reclaimed in recent years by young Irish speakers — which two characters use to communicate so that a nearby Englishman can’t understand.
A little basic cross-border knowledge is helpful for viewers as the tale unfolds — for example, the difference between Belfast, Northern Ireland’s cosmopolitan capital; Derry, its wily, western cousin (also known as Londonderry); and Donegal, the isolated county next door that is actually part of the Republic. But that was also the case with the plethora of in-jokes that helped make “Derry Girls” such rich, and hilarious, viewing.
Here, again, viewers will find a tapestry of Irish pop cultural deep cuts. Among them are Deirdre O’Kane, one of the island’s most popular comics, and Patrick Kielty, the host of “The Late Late Show,” a broadcast institution that is a touchstone of Irish culture, faithfully viewed by many every Friday evening.
McGee said that she had faith that international viewers of “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast” will be able to follow a universal story, regardless of how many cultural Easter eggs exist in the subtext.
“In ‘Derry Girls,’ everyone kept saying, ‘Oh, people won’t get this,” she said. “They might not understand what the characters are talking about, but they get a feeling of it.”
“There’s a way to sort of have your cake,” McGee added, “and eat it.”
Or, as a character quips in “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast”: “You can be in bits and have your highlights done. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.
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