Derry-born Lisa McGee is stepping onto new turf, developing FX and 20th Television’s comedy series WILDWOOD, set against the backdrop of New Jersey’s Jersey Shore in the summer of 2000. The story follows a group of Irish college students who arrive in Wildwood with absolutely no plan for what comes next, and McGee is taking the reins as both creator and executive producer, marking her first project to step outside of Ireland and the UK entirely. For a writer whose name has become inseparable from Derry’s storytelling voice, this feels like a genuinely exciting expansion.

McGee remains best known for her semi-autobiographical Channel 4 series DERRY GIRLS, which first aired in 2018 and followed a group of teenagers navigating adolescence in Northern Ireland during the 1990s. The show ran for three seasons and picked up Best Comedy honours at the BAFTAs, the International Emmys, and the Irish Film and Television Awards, cementing itself as one of the defining Irish comedies of its era.

Speaking to Hot Press shortly after the DERRY GIRLS finale in 2022, McGee reflected candidly on the barriers she faced coming up as a working-class writer from Derry. She had wanted to be a playwright or screenwriter, she said, though at the time it felt like a naïve ambition given how few working-class girls had been afforded those opportunities before her. The local figures she admired, writers like Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness who captured their home place so vividly, were all men. She noted, with some relief, that things have shifted since then.

McGee’s body of work extends well beyond DERRY GIRLS. She wrote an episode of the 2022 BBC series SKINT and co-created THE DECEIVED for Channel 5, LONDON RUSH for Channel 4, and RAW for RTÉ. Her most recent series, HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST, landed on Netflix this past February. Her writing credits also include episodes of Channel 4’s INDIAN SUMMERS, BBC1 and Starz’s THE WHITE QUEEN, and the BAFTA-winning BBC3 series BEING HUMAN. On the stage side, her play JUMP! was adapted into a film in 2012, and she won a Stewart Parker Award for her 2006 play GIRLS AND DOLLS.

No release date has been announced yet for WILDWOOD, but with McGee’s track record of turning specific, lived-in worlds into universally beloved television, this is one to watch closely.