Derry Girls is a raucous Netflix comedy produced by Lisa Magee about two long-simmering conflicts: troubles and adolescence in Northern Ireland.
Returning for its third and final season on Friday, the series is, first and foremost, a brutally funny coming-of-age story that follows five working-class friends working at a Catholic girls’ school in the 1990s. But even the title of the show always presents a larger political battle. I introduce myself as living in Londonderry.
“Londonderry” is the official name, preferred by Protestant members who support the rest of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. “Delhi” is how Erin’s Catholic friends and neighbors know her. In the intro, a military vehicle passes by, the camera sails over young people spray painting a road sign “London-“, “dreams” Plays with the Cranberries soundtrack.
This is “Delhi Girls” made with 90’s pop music and spray paint. It documents a bubblegum punk who grew up in a conflict zone with a spirited and optimistic spirit.
Serious and awkward Erin and her friends — crazy Aura (Louisa Harland). nerve-sack Claire (Nicola Coughlan, “Bridgerton”); serious Michelle (Jamie Lee O’Donnell); , social standing, breaking the rules, and evading Sister Michael (Siobhan McSweeney), their cynic and tormented fool principal.
Like a strict school teenage boy, McGee is a master smuggler. In “Derry Girls,” she Wilde weaves sociopolitical commentary into her comedic stuffing.
Nearly every episode is built around a classic, gleefully executed sitcom premise (deception, road trips, quirky misunderstandings) and inevitably descends into an avalanche of poor decisions exacerbated by extraordinary circumstances. and usually ends in disciplinary action or possibly a house fire.
But the antics are grounded in a lived sense of teenage reality and the spiky chemistry between the leads.McGee’s writings are riotous and lively. Dialogue ricochets like pinball and uses curse words like punctuation marks. (Unfortunately, I can’t quote most of the best lines.) In “Derry Girls,” teenage girlhood is imagined as a kind of volatile chemistry. The character, delightfully, has no cold at all.
That they live in a place torn apart by sectarian violence is a background noise and an unmanageable complication of everyday life. In the pilot, the commute on the first day of school is complicated by a bomb scare. Michelle brought a suitcase of vodka on the bus, but after refusing to acknowledge its ownership to avoid being arrested for underage drinking, the “underage bag” caused an evacuation. was destroyed by the bomb squad.
Puberty is like a bomb threat in itself. It also has a ticking clock. The characters in “Delhi Girls” are on the cusp of change, as is the place where they live. Season 2 ends with US President Bill Clinton’s visit to Northern Ireland in 1995 to facilitate the peace process. As Season 3 begins, the girls are faced with what life will look like after graduation, even as Delhi ponders what will happen after the peace deal.
This theme heightens the sense of stakes in the seven-episode final season, despite the ongoing turmoil. A character is revealed to have his family imprisoned for the rebellion. Multiple characters in the family are touched by death.
Adulthood looms over everything. In her season premiere, the girls stress about the results of an important school exam, and Claire’s meltdown captures their anxieties. we are girls we are poor We are from Northern Ireland. We are Catholic for Christ’s sake! (Cofflan’s transformation into a melted panic fireball is fun to watch.)
The final season highlights the odds against girls with a notable episode flashing back to their parents as members of the class of ’77.The Elders, comic support clowns for much of the series, were once kids who exploded with their own hormones and punk rebellion. “teenage kick” It was introduced as “our national anthem” by Derry’s the Undertones. )
All of this is based on a double-length finale in which the girls turn 18 in 1998 and Northern Ireland is about to vote in a Good Friday referendum, a power-sharing deal between warring factions. Perhaps our heroine is just one of her in a long chain of generational connections between Delhi girls and Delhi women. But the finale cheerfully but not gleefully suggests that it’s imperative to believe that things could be different, or at least could be.
“Delhi Girls,” like many quick British comedies, is relatively short, allowing it to condense adolescence into a cohesive space. It seems like a very short time in retrospect, but a lot happens. The series manages to finish at its best in its original state before the incredible aging sets in, or the inevitable softening of the characters that plague long-running sitcoms.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have happily watched 200 episodes of “Derry Girls.” But its quick ending is in keeping with the show’s unemotional spirit.