Derry Girls

Lisa McGee's comedy takes place during Northern Ireland's Troubles, but exudes a timeless and universal appeal.

What do they do now that peace is looming and adulthood is staring them in the face, threatening to change everything about the world as they know it? The impeccable writing pays homage to Irish history, and crucially honors the legacy of female friendships (and their one English fella), especially those formed in hallowed hallways and during sleepovers. When he claims he still feels out of place, Michelle poignantly tells him: “Being a Derry girl is a state of mind.” And that right there, folks, is the line of the show. Derry Girls doesn’t dismiss the seriousness of the conflict, though. In the final seven episodes, the girls and their unlikely English lad get to mature without losing any of their eccentricities. As season three kicks off, the Troubles are almost over, and our protagonists are about to turn 18. The on-point Irish jargon (helpful tip: keep the subtitles on) makes Derry Girls more immersive. Derry Girls offers an excellent snapshot of the ’90s Derry bubble, aided by shooting on location. Derry Girls’ entertaining teens—Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), her cousin Orla (Louisa Harland), and friends Clare (Nicola Coughlan) and Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell)—have a knack for landing in bizarre situations. The show’s beauty lies in an effervescent portrait of friendship, with the flawless cast’s comedic spark crackling through the screen. After all, being a teen is a dumpster fire no matter where in the world you suffer through it. A hilarious and hyper-specific ’90s nostalgia trip, it’s focused on the four titular Derry girls and one “wee English fella.” The series, which returns to Netflix in the U.S.

'Derry Girls' star Saoirse-Monica Jackson on Lisa McGee's writing, the season-three finale, the inspiration for Erin's many faces, that kiss with James, ...

I remember writing to the BRIT School (a prestigious performing-arts school in London) at age 12, and you had to be 16 to go there. And I just love the sheer and utter balls of Erin kissing him first; I love that she went in for it. Erin is a mash-up of myself as a teenager, Lisa as a teenager, and the girls of Derry today. I love the idea of her and Bill and Hillary just sat around together with a bowl of popcorn watching Derry Girls. She even says it in that closing speech — that she’s scared of the world and doesn’t feel ready for it all. I almost wanted to see more of them as a couple. She was sort of going through that time as a teenager when no matter what we said — and I think I’m quite a cool older cousin — she was repulsed or acted like we were ruining her life. My brother went to school in the south, and I went to school in the north. My mom was from the south, from Donegal, and my dad’s from Derry, so I think I had the best of both worlds. That nature gets passed on to the young girls — fighting for what you want and what you need, believing in who you are, and having this thirst for the entire world. I think the success of the show was mainly down to Lisa’s writing. But when Jackson speaks, the differences between the actor and her character become apparent: Erin talks at two octaves higher, is much more animated, and will contort her entire body just to make a point or scrunch her face in multiple directions at once to show disgust, awe, or incomprehension.

"I'm the only writer on the show, so it's kind of been my life for the last five years," admits McGee.

People always say they'd never want to go back and relive their teenage years, but I kind of did, and it's been so weird and lovely. [fight for their reproductive rights](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/abortion-walkout-reproductive-rights) in the U.S. The show is always a balm, but right now, as teen girls

The wains compete in the singing competition 'Starz in their Eyes' while Mary's at her wit's end. A recap of season three, episode two of 'Derry Girls,' ...

I know this is developmentally appropriate behavior, and I know the show isn’t on Erin’s side at all on this matter, but I would like to note once more what an absolute dickhead she’s being at this moment. Obviously, Mary and Gabriel are not having an affair; instead, Gabriel is encouraging her to take her literary nerdery to the next level. Erin can’t contain her sadness and fury any longer, either, and in typical Erin fashion, she hits fifth gear right away, accusing Gabriel of being “just a pervert with a jazzy-jumpered ma fetish.” A lavish chef’s kiss to this triumph of incandescent, hyperbolic rage. Gabriel tells her nobody needs to know and passes her a piece of paper with a phone number on it, saying it’s a standing offer: “I know how to get what I want.” On the wains’ side of things, it’s Children in Need Week, and they’re rehearsing a song-and-dance number for the school’s Starz in Their Eyes night in hopes of winning the opportunity to perform it live on the BBC. It’s time for the wains’ performance as the musical queens of 1997, the Spice Girls. He remains a rather pitiful scrounger of coolness points and time in the spotlight, which he’ll hog up this time as the onstage host of the event. Game, set, match: The unbelievable is actually happening, and Erin’s world is rearranging itself around her in real time. It’s nearly impossible to believe Mary would conduct an affair right under Gerry’s nose, but the wains’ suspicion is raised then hoisted way, way up in the manner of an overwrought mainsail of emotions when they follow a suspiciously well-dressed Mary to what she’s claimed is a party for a friend. Viewers voted on the performances, and the most successful contestants would perform live on the season finale.) Father Peter, whose hair thing this season is a truly nauseating and desperate low ponytail, will play host in this episode. Creeping down the stairs, she can see them standing close enough to be urgently whispering and hears something about how badly Mary wants to do something but feels she can’t. In under two and a half minutes, we see Mary subjected to the following: her sister Sarah’s typically harebrained scheme to trick some store into giving her 22 free items of makeup, the boiler being on the blink and nobody leaping to call the plumber, Erin inquiring about the location of her fountain pen, and Orla’s plaintive wails upon discovering they’re out of chocolate Pop-Tarts.

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Derry Girls. Nearly five months after the series finale aired on Channel 4, U.S.-based Netflix subscribers ...

Lisa wrote in her statement about the end of Derry Girls. The show wraps up in 1998 (the finale takes place after a one-year time jump) with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which many consider to be the official end of The Troubles. The characters themselves were at the right age for a natural ending to Derry Girls, and the actors who play them are also busy with other projects. "It was always the plan to say goodbye after three series'," Lisa wrote in a Twitter statement in 2021. start to become adults, while around them the place they call home starts to change too and Northern Ireland enters a new more hopeful phrase — which was a small, magical window of time..." The third season debuted on Netflix on Oct.

The season premiere finds the wains stressing about test results, attempting a heist, and meeting a detective chief inspector with a particular set of ...

Instead, the best episodes of Derry Girls are more akin to the most relentlessly escalating Key and Peele sketches, such as To what end, we will never know, because the ways of cats are too mysterious for us to fathom, but wake up, sheeple, the conspiracy is plain as day! He doesn’t really think they’re burglars, and just wants to know if they can identify the real culprits, but he’s clueless as to the effect of the setting for this little chitchat. Ever helpful, Michelle can identify one of their butts, sadly a piece of information that doesn’t clear the bar as a rationale for a warrant. (The GCSE is the U.K.’s rough equivalent of a high-school diploma in the U.S., and good results are required for students to attend an extra year of high school in preparation for A-level exams. Derry Girls’ own Cassandra is cursed to see and understand reality and yet is unable to convince anyone around him of that reality. Unlike the girls, she’s supremely unbothered about their GCSE results because the school has already received them for all students, “and also, I don’t care.” Rather than provide specifics, she advises the wains to enjoy what time they have left. That’s not to say everyone is footloose and fancy-free; the girls are anxiously awaiting exam results that will determine the course of their lives forevermore, while Gerry and Granda Joe embark on an errand that teeters on a knife edge between silly and grim. Both genuinely LOL-worthy, near-throwaway jokes about the agony caused by centuries of colonial violence are rare as hen’s teeth and will fall flat if their funny-to-bleak proportions are off. While browsing the racks at the video-rental shop, the wains pester Dennis about how it’s possible for him to work there and at the sweetshop until he finally exclaims “Jesus Christ, I was asked less questions when I was interned!” Let’s hit pause here to admire one of the best and most quintessentially Derry Girls lines of the episode. As the wains deny any knowledge whatsoever of American Gigolo, the camera pushes in on Mary and Sarah, looking very guilty in the background. If this absolute banger of a sitcom is new to you, I encourage you to fire up the pilot before proceeding further.

The third and final season of Derry Girls has finally hit Netflix. Hear how stars Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Jamie-Lee O'Donnell and Dylan Llewellyn feel about ...

Really, it's so sad but also so happy to have him have a great ending and have the show have a great ending. And to say goodbye to the character James and to the show is, it's like a mix of emotions. It's one of the biggest Halloween celebrations in the world and we get loads of tourists and stuff coming over and we really make a big deal out of it. And to have the people of Derry all be extras in our Halloween sequence and people come out to just watch us film, it's so amazing. JL: I'm going on to shoot the second season of a show I've done over here, a Channel Four show called Screw. Those were always fun and stuck out for me, and doing rehearsals with the girls and learning the dance routines was always good fun. And even though it's a studio, it feels so warm and it feels so cozy and it feels so incredibly real. And that's just a real credit to Lisa McGee, the writer. So, they're sort of figuring out what they're gonna do, the next step after they leave school, where they want to go and what kind of becomes of them. And so, I think even from then on, it's sort of really built and built so much more. [third and final season](https://www.eonline.com/news/1323537/the-trailer-for-derry-girls-last-season-is-exactly-what-we-needed-this-st-patricks-day) of the hit comedy series already premiered in the U.K. But now, international fans will finally get to see how the Derry Girls' story comes to a close with the new season hitting [Netflix](https://www.eonline.com/news/netflix) on Oct.

The wains are heading to a seaside amusement park, but the train ride there ends up being long and eventful. A recap of season three, episode three of ...

The bigger reveal turns out to be that the backpack belongs to Aideen — the tough-looking guy is actually quite friendly and was just looking after the bag for her. The slight awkwardness of waiting together is ratcheted up to an 11 of second-hand mortification thanks to the woman staffing the ticket window, who is having a lengthy and detailed conversation with her soon-to-be-ex-husband about the many particulars of her dissatisfaction with their sex life. And they thought being stuck on the train was bad! He retaliates in kind by brandishing a banana at the girls, and I am now fully in mirth-tears over the silliness of this pickle. While Sarah and Mary are regrouping and strategizing one car over, the mystery woman’s identity comes out during a round of Guess Who played with Gerry: She’s their girlhood neighbor Aideen, unrecognizable to the Quinns because she lost so much weight in prison. This season seems to be exploring those similarities in more depth, and that’s all to the good. Falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy, they continue to feign knowing and proceed to paint themselves into a conversational corner until they both claim to be having flare-ups of irritable-bowel syndrome to escape being found out. The Quinn family entourage just barely makes it out of town thanks to waiting for the train on the wrong platform and having to race to the right one at the last moment. Up in the other train car, the mystery woman plunks herself down for a more in-depth chat. They don’t have a clue who she is, but she’s about to hop off at the next stop, so no harm, no foul. [Democratic Unionist Party](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50315891) (a loyalist political party led by Reverend Ian Paisley) won’t negotiate with [Sinn Féin](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50315250) (the political wing of the IRA, led by [Gerry Adams](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27238602)) unless the IRA decommission its weapons. Gerry’s gentle reminder that the train journey is all of an hour backfires by leading her to decide to make another ten or 12 sandwiches.

From left: Dylan Llewellyn as James, Saoirse-Monica Jackson as Erin, Jamie-Lee O'Donnell as Michelle, Nicola Coughlan as Clare, and Louisa Harland as Orla ...

One of the girls comes out as a lesbian, and the response is touchingly ho-hum and supportive among this deeply Catholic community. , in the center of town at the end of Season Two. In 2008, the film " [Hunger](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986233/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2)" was a star turn for Michael Fassbender, playing the martyred Catholic hunger striker, Bobby Sands. (The "across the barricades" scheme dreaded by Erin's mother.) Both women pushed back against the Irish state's and Catholic Church's marginalization of women. In Season Three, it's Sister Michael who experiences a vocational challenge, one that viewers will be happy to know exposes her as the not-so-secret feminist she is. ("There's something really sexy about the fact that they hate us so much," she says in the middle of the annual Protestant Orangemen's triumphal march through Catholic neighborhoods.) [Derry Girls](https://www.netflix.com/title/80238565)" is the creation of writer Lisa McGee, who based it on her life growing up in Derry. (Coughlan is a master at showing Clare's hourly inner torments, like how she's going to make it through lunch fasting for the children of Africa.) If there's a breakout star in "Derry Girls" its Siobhán McSweeney as Sister Michael, the school's formidable, sarcastic, judo-practicing, DeLorean-driving headmistress. In one of the show's final moments, we see them now 18 and voting in the American fans of "Derry Girls" can finally say their goodbyes to Northern Irish Catholic teenager Erin Quinn, her cousin Orla, and their friends Clare, Michelle and James as the third and final season airs Oct.

When Sister Michael's aunt dies, the wains go to clean up the deceased's house as a favor and instantly become convinced it's haunted.

All is chaos, culminating in the wains wrestling the ghost to the floor and screaming at the sudden arrival of Sister Michael. She manages to sort out this comedy of errors and to convince the supposed ghost not to press charges against the wains for breaking and entering. Family would win out, and that would be the end of her friendship with Erin, and she can’t bear the thought. Turns out, the irate hammer-wielding man on the floor is the house’s new owner, Declan, and not the ghost of Robert. It’s too cold to go without it and she’s on the brink of being late to the bingo hall! Mary prevails, and they head out to request a session with local psychic Carlos Santini, who’s very happy to attempt to contact the late Mrs. As they potter around, assessing the state of the house, they find a 1941 wedding photo, noting that the happy couple are Annie and Robert. Mammy McCool has been dead a decade now, and they’re starting to get a little sore about the fact that she hasn’t gotten in touch. Once they get to Donegal, they need to stop to ask for directions, and the woman they approach speaks only Gaelic. They consider walking back to the village to get help or at least directions to the closest hospital for James, but a huge crack of thunder, followed by driving rain, puts paid to that idea. Off the girls go to Donegal, James behind the wheel of the school van, to take care of the cleaning that very same day. Jamie-Lee O’Donnell (Michelle) and Siobhán McSweeney (formally, Sister George Michael) are two of the strongest comic actors on the show (I rate Ian McElhinney as Granda Joe in the same echelon), and when their performances are front and center, every scene crackles with extra comedic energy, providing a little kick that makes everything else better.