How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee returns with a madcap mystery

Derry Girls wrapped up four years ago, but surely those rambunctious Irish girls are still floating around in your head. Anyone who declares, “Well, I am not being individual on me own”, gets to live rent free.

Now, Lisa McGee, the Derry Girls creator, has a new series to lay claim to another slice of your mind.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is a rowdy mystery series that brings that same spirit of chaotic friendship that seems to constantly be strained, but you know will always endure. There’s something really beautiful and comforting about that.

Set in the present day, the series is centred on three women who are old friends from Belfast – Robyn (Sinead Keenan), Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher).

Saoirse is a TV writer several years into a successful crime procedural but she and her lead star are clashing. The stresses are piling up and she wants to just throw it all in, when she receives a message that the fourth member of their school group, someone they’ve drifted away from in recent years, Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), has died.

She flies home to Belfast from London, and the three friends head for Greta’s wake in a small town, Knockdara, over the border in the Republic of Ireland.

It’s a strange place full of odd people, but the weirdest thing is the vibes at Greta’s wake. Something’s off, including what Saoirse thought she saw inside the coffin when she arduously prised off the lid.

Robyn and Dara are initially sceptical, but then it’s all going arseways, and before they know what they’re caught up in, they become the target of a woman named Brooker (Bronagh Gallagher), who’s a little too quick with a gun.

There’s a madcap mystery afoot that will see the friends criss-crossing not just between Northern and the Republic of Ireland, but also takes them to Portugal in a memorable episode high on shenanigans.

There is a lot going on, especially in the first half of the eight episodes, so you do, shock horror, need to pay attention.

Even then, the plot can be unwieldy and a number of elements including flashbacks to at least three different time periods don’t make sense or seem to have enough context until much later on. Everything does more or less tie together, plus or minus a couple of plot holes.

But the mystery is not really the point, or it’s not the main point, even though it is rooted in themes of unresolved trauma and the secrets we carry around.

What you’re really here for is the combustion between the three friends because it’s absolutely gas.

The trio have that ease and familiarity of women who have been in each other’s lives for decades and, significantly, have known each other since before they became who they are now.

They’re the friends who call you out on your bulls—t, like when Robyn and Dara does to Saoirse when the latter says she now lives in London even though she’s back in Belfast for more than half the year filming her TV series.

Or when Dara is jolted by Robyn and Saoirse into action because they know she’s hiding behind her fear. Or when Robyn is being called out for her high-strung neuroses.

You want to follow them everywhere, and in that sense, you can absolutely see the same hand that guided Derry Girls in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. McGee knows how to write female voices who are now cowed by decorum or convention.

And then she surrounds them with an ensemble of supporting kooks including Derry Girls’ Saoirse Monica-Jackson, who shows up in the most brilliant costumes that would make even a Harajuku girl feel awed.

This series may not have the full thematic heft of Derry Girls, and is a little scrappier in terms of narrative cohesion, but, damn, if it isn’t craic-ing good fun.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is on Netflix