Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee addresses ‘pressure’ of her Netflix comedy thriller

After creating a series that was hailed as ‘perfect’, Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee has kept fans eagerly awaiting her next project.

The Irish screenwriter, 45, started her career creating the series’ Raw and London Irish, but became a household name with the release of her semi-autobiographical comedy show about five teenagers growing up in Derry in the 1990s during The Troubles.

Running for three seasons between 2018 and 2022, Derry Girls became the most-watched series in Northern Ireland since modern records began, attracting an average of 2.5million viewers per episode. It also gained international recognition after winning an Emmy Award.

So, when it came time to turning her attention to her next project, Lisa might have understandably felt the weight of creating a worthy follow-up.

‘With this I remember thinking, which sounds obvious, but I wanted to write something I really wanted to watch – and I love the mystery genre,’ she explained when speaking to Metro ahead of the release of her new Netflix series, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.

‘Obviously it has a lot of Derry Girls DNA being about a group of women and that sense of humour is very similar, but I wanted a genre shift. I think if I was to have gone on and done a straight comedy again, I would have felt more pressure.

‘There was a lot of pressure around that last episode of Derry Girls, that I don’t feel about this. There were different challenges, because it’s a mystery and hour long and has lots of pieces to put together, but I don’t feel any pressure about it being compared to Derry Girls as I think it’s different enough. But I do just feel pressure that I hope people like it, which is just the way I always feel,’ she laughs.

An eight-part thriller, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast follows three best friends in their 30s – Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) – who reunite after learning their estranged high school friend has died.

Soon after, the trio find themselves wrapped up in an eerie turn of events which sees them facing a ‘dark, dangerous and hilarious odyssey through Ireland and beyond as each tries to piece together the truth of the past’.

It was a visit to her old high school that initially provided Lisa with the inspiration for the series. After learning that the grounds of the convent school she attended had been abandoned and had caught the interest of ghost-hunters, she decided to take a look for herself.

‘After watching Derry Girls screenings with friends, I had this idea about the relationship between your old self and who you are now,’ she explained.

‘My school had shut down, and they’d moved across the road to a new one. It was a century- old convent and I heard ghost hunters were going there, and I really wanted to myself. My husband drove me, but told me he wasn’t going in. I went in and it was like the girls had walked out one day and never come back. There were scarves hanging up and still writing on the blackboard but still weeds growing over all this stuff. It was so cool, but so creepy, and I was walking down this little pass, and I had this feeling that I was going to bump into myself as a schoolgirl.

‘Obviously I wasn’t because that would be mad, but I thought there was something in that tone visually of them crossing paths.’

Although her trip back in time provided just the idea she needed for her next project, Lisa revealed that she was eventually also caught by a nun, who reprimanded her for trespassing. ‘Nothing changes – I was still getting told off by nuns,’ she quipped.

Although set between 2003 and the present day, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast still references The Troubles – with plenty of close to the bone jokes thrown in for good measure. One quip sees the Northern Irish group of friends told by a police officer from the south of the country: ‘It’s not like you lot to waste petrol.’

While Lisa always wanted to write shows set in Northern Ireland, when starting out her career she was reticent to touch on anything related to The Troubles.

‘It sounds bad, but I was a teenager and was honest to God so sick of turning on the news and found it all so boring. I wanted to tell different stories. But then, of course, the first thing anybody was interested in was set slap bang in the middle of the Troubles!’ she remarked.

Despite Derry Girls helping to educate countless people around the world about this period in Irish history, Lisa joked that her dad found it ‘remarkable because my grasp on history sometimes isn’t the best’.

‘But it was just my life and my experience, so it’s lovely. I remember writing that first series and was shocked realising how many people didn’t know certain details of that time and then I realised how much I could show people, that would also be funny for us (who lived through it). I really kind of started of leaning in then,’ she explained.

Describing how people turned to dark humour as a ‘coping mechanism’ to get through the decades of conflict, Lisa said it always felt ‘very natural’ to weave in jokes that she witnessed people making whilst growing up in Belfast.

But when first writing her seminal series, Lisa said she was in fact ‘really nervous’ that some may be offended. However, she believed that taking the approach of divisive topics being discussed by teenagers was a way to ‘filter and soften’ the jokes, allowing to be more easily ‘accepted’ by viewers.

Throughout its three seasons only one complaint about Derry Girls ever made its way to Lisa – with the writer caught completely off guard by the quip that apparently caused offence.

‘The only complaint I ever had was related to a line when Orla says that “the Protestants hate Abba” and the Orange Order put out a tweet saying they actually love Abba. I couldn’t believe it!’ she laughed.

It was in 2022 that Derry Girls came to an end with a series finale that was praised by both critics and audiences alike, with the final scenes set against the backdrop of the Good Friday Agreement.

In the years since, many have wondered if the series could ever be revived and follow the friends after the period of conflict in Northern Ireland was officially brought to an end – however Lisa revealed she had no plans to continue that story.

‘I don’t want to at the minute. I guess you never know, and I’ve seen writers say they’d never (revisit projects), but 20 years later they’ve done something. It can be done really well at times, but for me I think that’s it and I’m done. It was a really nice way to end it I thought,’ she explained.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is now streaming on Netflix.

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