Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: derry girls, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: Derry Girls Creator's Crap A-Team

Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee discusses How to Get to Heaven from Belfast and how her "s**t, female, Northern Irish A-Team" came to be.

For those with taste, Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee's next project is hotly anticipated, and she has the perfect summation of her mystery comedy thriller How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: "I wanted a shit, female, Northern Irish A-Team!" Who doesn't want to see that? How to Get to Heaven from Belfast follows Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan), and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), who have been pals since their teenage years at the accurately named Our Lady of the Sorrows school – and who get dragged into a Knives Out-style mystery after the shocking death of their school friend, Greta. Hilarity ensues. In Northern Ireland.

In a long and revealing interview with The Guardian, where she reveals everything about How to Get to Heaven from Belfast apart from plot spoilers, McGee said she took heavy inspiration from Columbo and Scooby-Doo. Like Derry Girls, it is a story about female friendships that span decades, the shared memories, and the pressure to edit those shared memories to suit our ideas of ourselves. All while trying to solve the murder of their friend in the most chaotic and messy way possible.

"The problem with a group of friends that have known each other since they were kids," says McGee, "is that you know everything. And sometimes you don't want that thing from your past being brought up 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 spiky. You're living this agreed lie. But in a more comical way, you get away with nothing. I remember starting to eat sushi when I was in my 20s and my friends being like: 'Who the hell do you think you are?'"

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is McGee's first major series after three seasons of Derry Girls, which was a smash hit in the UK and Ireland and has done very well on Netflix, leading the streamer to back the new series. McGee said she actually wrote an early version of it decades before Derry Girls.

"I wrote it as a play when I was at Queen's University here in Belfast, and it was about a reunion," she said. "I always loved the mystery genre, and I wanted to put my voice on something new," says McGee. "I really, really want people to like it, but I don't feel that pressure I had with Derry Girls, certainly when the third series was coming out. I felt like such a huge responsibility for that to land in a way that everyone at home was happy with. Now I feel like I'm just telling a story, and it happens to be set in Northern Ireland. I just hope people enjoy the ride. I hope they like the friendship group. I hope they laugh."

"When you think about the history of Northern Ireland, the people and the landscape, there's something so charming and beautiful, but it can turn really quickly," said McGee. "Something that was the most picturesque, gorgeous thing can become suddenly really dangerous. There are so many layers to the place with the history and what we've been through. The landscape is so wild and gorgeous, and in the dark, so scary. There's all the ingredients you need for a very scary story."

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast premieres this week on Netflix.

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