When Lisa McGee set out to write her new Netflix series HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST, she knew she was returning to familiar territory—not geographically, though Belfast certainly looms large, but thematically. The award-winning creator of DERRY GIRLS has always had a gift for excavating humor from the darkest soil, and her latest offering follows three friends reuniting for their childhood companion’s funeral, only to stumble into a mystery that spirals far beyond what any of them expected. It’s an unlikely premise for comedy, perhaps, but McGee has built her reputation on exactly this kind of tonal tightrope walk.
DERRY GIRLS found its comedic pulse against the backdrop of the Troubles in 1990s Northern Ireland, mining absurdist gold from the cultural fault lines that divided communities—who can forget the revelation that Protestants keep their toasters in cupboards, or that Catholics harbor an inexplicable devotion to statues? That show’s success lay in its ability to locate the ridiculous within the real, and HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST shares that same DNA. But where DERRY GIRLS was coming-of-age chaos, this new venture leans into something slightly more unsettling. The three friends arrive for their companion’s wake—a traditional Irish gathering where the deceased is brought home and mourners convene to talk, drink, and celebrate a life before burial or cremation—only to discover that nothing about their friend’s death is quite as straightforward as it seemed. What begins as grief soon curdles into suspicion, and before long they’re careening through an eerie adventure that takes them across Ireland and beyond.
McGee describes the show as essentially a murder mystery, though she’s quick to add the qualifier “but funny, hopefully.” It’s that hope, that refusal to let darkness have the final word, that defines her work. Starring Sinéad Keenan as Robyn, Caoilfhionn Dunne as Dara, and Róisín Gallagher as Saoirse, the series centers three women at a particular inflection point in their lives—the kind of stage where careers plateau or surge, where aging parents require care, where motherhood and ambition collide in ways no one quite prepared you for. McGee knows this terrain intimately, having drawn on her own friendships and experiences when crafting the show. She wanted to give these women one last adventure, a chance to shake off the weight of responsibility and rediscover something they’d lost along the way.
Central to everything is Belfast itself, and the dark Northern Irish sense of humor that McGee wields like a scalpel. Some of the themes are darker than what viewers might expect from the woman who gave us uniformed Catholic schoolgirls navigating bomb scares and boy bands, and the genre shift is deliberate. There’s mystery here, genuine suspense, but it’s all filtered through a lens that refuses to take itself too seriously. McGee has always understood that laughter and grief aren’t opposites but neighbors, and in HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST, they share a wall so thin you can hear one through the other. It’s a show about death, yes, but also about friendship, about the versions of ourselves we leave behind, and about what happens when the past reaches out and demands we pay attention. And if that sounds heavy, well, McGee has never been afraid of weight—she just knows how to make you laugh while you’re carrying it.
