A hysterically funny and wildly cartoonish coming of age comedy set against the backdrop of civil war and terrorism, Derry Girls slams together discordant tones harder than a head-on collision between two cars going 90 miles per hour. The show was a major hit when it aired in the U.K. in early 2018, but it only just hit Netflix here in the U.S.A. in late December. I know Sex Education is the big pond-crossing Netflix hit, and I’m sure that’s great and all, but I wanted to give a little love to this strange little comedy and maybe encourage you to make time for all (*checks notes*) six half hour episodes.
Because this tone shouldn’t work. At all. But it does, thanks in part to writer Lisa McGee’s ability to fling more jokes per second at the screen than you can keep up with, and in part to an ensemble of new and established talent all doing their utmost to keep up with the material. No matter how ridiculous, or ridiculously mean, McGee’s scripts get, her cast seems game to try most anything.
And make no mistake: Derry Girls is gleefully mean at (many) times, wringing jet-black laughs both from the commonplace struggles of coming of age as a teenager and from the extra-special levels of tension and awkwardness that exist when you live in a police state where soldiers patrol every street, bombs are a daily concern, and there is a palpable threat of violence most every day.
But even though the violence is right next door, it often feels worlds away for the eponymous girls as they start a new school year in Derry, Northern Ireland at the height of ‘The Troubles’, that period of guerrilla war that consumed the country from 1966 until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (though the conflicts in Ireland and Northern Ireland stretched back for centuries before this period, and have never been fully, finally resolved).
Our point man (er, so to speak) for this particular group is Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) who is determined to identify and join whatever cool kids would have her (none will). Until then, Erin is stuck with her own group of friends, including her gonzo cousin Orla (Louisa Harland), the high-strung Clare (Nicola Coughlan), trouble-making would-be It Girl Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), and Michelle’s terrified English cousin James (Dylan Llewellyn), who is forced to attend the all-girls Catholic school with the others because of the (justified) fear that the denizens of the boys school would beat the crap out of him. Not that he has it especially easy with his cousin.
“She [my Auntie Kathy] went all the way to England to have an abortion, never came back,” Michelle explains. “Never got the abortion either, lucky for you James, eh!”
“I didn’t actually know that,” poor James mutters.
Through just six episodes (damn British television) McGee fleshes out the world around these girls from their school (ruled by jaded nun Sister Michael [Siobhan McSweeney]) to their home lives (which includes Barristan Selmy himself, Ian McElhinney, as Erin’s grandfather), until you feel at home in their cramped houses, uniformed schools, and troubled streets.
McGee understands the most important part of an ensemble, besides group chemistry (which this cast has in spades), is making sure each member of the ensemble has their own distinct comedic voice and engine. Everyone gets their own moment and method to shine, with my particular favorite being Harland as the anarchic, spacey Orla. You truly never know what nonsense is going to come out of her mouth, and Harland moves through the world with an awkward assurance, Harpo Marx reborn as a lanky, curly-haired Irish girl. I’m also partial to McSweeney’s killer deadpan as Sister Michael, turning even the simplest of lines into a nail-studded bat with just the slightest inflection. Sister Michael isn’t in the show all that much (again: six episodes), but in just that short period of time McSweeney proves to be as indelible a comedic utility player as Nick Offerman’s legendary work as Ron Effing Swanson.
But, again, everybody gets their chance to shine. And if one character or joke in Derry Girls fails to land for you, you can be assured that another one is going to come firing at you in a second or more. The show churns through jokes and story at an incredible rate, often ending up in some place utterly disconnected from where they began. How the girls go from trying to think of ways to raise money to go on a school trip to Paris to tying themselves up in a half-burnt apartment so they can fake having been taken hostage…well, to be honest I’m still not entirely sure how Derry Girls worked its way there. I was laughing too hard.
But as silly as all this is, as over-the-top as things get, there’s something honest about even these wackiest of moments. We haven’t all faked being held hostage by terrorists to get out of trouble (I mean…I assume), but everyone has been a teenager at some point (I mean…I assume). We’ve all swaggered out to meet a world we think we’ve gotten old enough, smart enough, mature enough, to handle completely, only to be turned, twisted, and left confounded by the way the adult world refuses to play by the rules and changes out from under your feet. Derry Girls is deeply specific to the culture and time period in which it takes place (a word of advice: subtitles are going to be your best friend during some of the more rapid-fire exchanges) but its concerns are universal.
And maybe it’s because Derry Girls treats The Troubles with such a shrug much of the time that the few moments when the violence does come close to home truly hurt. The show builds to a sequence that intercuts a moment of communal joy with a moment of horror, a sequence where all in the ensemble lay aside their snark and defenses to share in something, be that celebration or trauma. It’s a massive sucker punch of an ending, and it lands so well precisely because McGee withheld playing those particular cards for so long.
Season 2 apparently started filming back in October, though God knows when we’ll get the chance to see it here across the pond. But I can’t wait to find out where McGee takes the girls (and boy) as they stumble their way towards adulthood and whatever passes for maturity in this world. If it can be this filthy, this funny, and this defiantly empathetic even in the midst of all that filth and fun, then I look forward to watching for years to come.
