“It’s trash, women’s team!” Derry Girl Lisa McGee in her hilarious new mystery film | television

HAre you watching a show about girls in Derry? With one about women in Belfast, obviously. That’s what Lisa McGee did. Her new eight-part book, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, is about as far from Derry Girls as you can get when the distance between worlds is 70 miles along the A6.

Or as she says: “I wanted a top-flight Northern Irish team!”

Part thriller, part surreal comedy, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast follows Saoirse (Roisín Gallagher), Robin (Sinead Keenan) and Dara (Coalvion Dunne), who have been friends since their teenage years at the aptly-named School of Our Lady of Sorrows – and who are drawn into a Knives Out-style mystery after the shocking death of their school friend, Greta.

Although the series is described as a dark comedy thriller – McGee also took plenty of inspiration from Columbo and Scooby-Doo – it is, at heart, like Derry Girls before it, a story about friendship. More specifically, about female friendships spanning decades, shared memories and the pressure to modify those shared memories to fit our ideas of ourselves.

“The problem with a group of friends who have known each other since they were kids,” McGee says, “is that you know everything. And sometimes you don’t want to bring up that thing from your past again. Or you don’t want to talk about that story because it doesn’t represent you as you see yourself now. So it can get quite prickly. You’re living this agreed-upon lie. But in a more comical way, you don’t get away with anything. I remember starting to eat sushi when I was in my 20s and my friends saying, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast follows three seasons of Derry Girls, which was a smash hit for McGee. But it actually predates him by decades. “I wrote it as a play when I was at Queen’s University here in Belfast, and it was about a reunion,” McGee says.

It took the name from the leaflets that Christian associations placed in its hands during Freshers’ Week. “I haven’t done anything yet, and it hasn’t been very good,” she joked of her original book, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. “But then during Derry Girls, a lot of my school friends started coming to the first performances…” It was seeing those old friends again that made her return to the play she wrote 20 years ago.

Like the teen thriller Yellow Vests, the story jumps back and forth in time, showing the gang as adults but also as teenage people. The memories of the past are vague, all satanic symbols etched on the walls and burning sheds in the forest. Other times it’s as explosive as a show like The White Lotus… if it were filmed in Ballycastle (there’s somehow a yacht and a car chase, and they both explode).

Before they embark on a crazy detective adventure to uncover the truth about Greta’s death, the women’s circumstances become alarming. Dara lives at home, taking care of her overbearing mother after a terrible breakup; Saoirse is a TV writer in London engaged to a man she doesn’t really love; And Robin, a glamorous but troubled mother of four, is married to someone she doesn’t love either. Greta’s death upsets them, but it also provides an escape from the monotony and allows them to embrace the strange elements of their lives. It’s inevitable, really, in a place like the Northwest. “People in Derry are always weird,” Robin believes.

Together the three travel to Greta’s wake, where they encounter her strange family. Her mother lies about Greta’s childhood. Her daughter, wide-eyed and ghostly in a frog hat, scares them all. Worst of all is her widower, police officer Owen (Emmett J. Scanlan), who is determined to pass himself off as a grieving husband while seemingly hiding more sinister secrets.

The show is a mystery within a mystery. As they try to uncover the truth about Greta’s death, Robin, Saoirse and Dara confront the dark secret from their teenage years that none of them want to return to. The trio have matching tribal tattoos (Greta had one too), the meaning of which is never explained. They’re adamant that they “did nothing wrong” about “the thing we never talked about,” but the audience is only disturbed by what that thing could be — and whether women are lying to us, and to themselves, about their guilt.

Like the mysterious Scooby-Doo gang running riot in the hills and villages of western Northern Ireland, Saoirse, Dara and Robin are more likely to stumble upon a murder mystery than to solve it. They crash the wrong funeral wearing Disney princess masks, sparking a scandal in the church full of mourners. A hurricane (bad weather, even for Ireland) forces them to take refuge in the attic of eccentric hotelier Seamus (Ardal O’Hanlon), who wears a yarn tie and spends his evenings hosting a series of ever-more exotic-themed discos. Dara extracts information from the local funeral director by organizing her mother’s funeral – and very much alive.

In other words, madness may be fatal, but it is still madness. The crimes and tragedies here are offbeat and fantastical – a Fermanagh boy was raised by chickens, and a Kenny Rogers impersonator from Ballybunion was killed when he was thrown from a Bronco during the country song Boot Scootin’ Boogie.

“I’ve always loved that kind of mystery, and I wanted to put my voice to something new,” McGee says. “I really want people to like it, but I don’t feel the pressure I did [with Derry Girls]Certainly when the third series came out. I felt a huge responsibility to make it happen in a way that everyone in the house was happy with. Now I feel like I’m just telling a story and it’s set in Northern Ireland. I just hope people enjoy the ride. I hope they like the friendship group. I hope they laugh.”

McGee lives in Belfast with her husband, English actor Tobias Beer, and their two sons after 12 years in London. “I was very frustrated with London,” she says. “But I was also frustrated when I got home, because I didn’t feel like I was part of it.” These experiences are mirrored in Saoirse, who will not commit to life anywhere, and endures the indignity of having her colleagues explain away her rudeness as a cultural trait. “I’m so sorry, she’s Irish,” one says. Saoirse’s name is often shortened to “Seersh,” which is arguably a little less torture than being an Irish writer in London called “Róisín” and constantly having your name shortened to “Rowsh.”

“That’s what’s really interesting about identity,” McGee says. “You don’t quite know where you fit in. Your job takes you there, but there are things about this place that frustrate you so much. And then you come home and people say: ‘I don’t care about your stupid job in London.’

There are elements of the Derry Girls in all the characters of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. McGee says Dara resembles Orla, while Robyn shares a lot of the same DNA as Michelle, and is based on the same real-life friend, who grew up to be a similarly glamorous mother of four. But there is an advantage to friendships that rings truer to the experience of dealing with relationships in adulthood. “It’s the same group of girls, but we’re all grown up now and we still don’t know what to do!” she says.

Although How to Get to Heaven deals with the inalienable truths of life — fashion is circular, friendship is complicated, you’ll never find a crowd for a closed casket at a funeral, and you obviously don’t marry a police officer, although it might be nice to ride one sometimes — it feels quintessentially Northern Irish in tone, a darkly comedic odyssey through Lynch’s bleakness in rural northwest Ireland.

“When you think about the history of Northern Ireland, the people and the landscape, there is something that is so magical and beautiful, but it can change so quickly,” McGee says. “Something that was the most amazing and wonderful thing [can become] Suddenly really dangerous. There are so many layers to the place with the history and what we went through. The landscape is so wild and picturesque and in the dark so scary. There are all the ingredients you need for a very scary story.

If there is misery in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, it is short-lived. “I don’t think you can handle that level of depression,” McGee says. “Really bad things have been happening here for a long time, but it’s like you can’t keep it going. Someone might say something silly or do something inappropriate and then the conversation changes. I think comedy is more honest than drama sometimes because people are just being silly, especially in a place like Northern Ireland.”

That doesn’t mean they’re not great to watch. As with Derry Girls, the women are active protagonists, not passive characters who watch their lives pass them by. “They needed to feel powerful,” McGee says. “A lot of the time they don’t make it better, a lot of the time they make it worse. I wanted any woman watching this to think, ‘Oh, this seems a little hard, but I’d love to do this with my friends.’ I’d love to solve something like that.” That’s always been my driving force…and sometimes you need to blow some stuff up.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is available on Netflix February 12.