Derry Girls Creator Turns to Crime in Netflix’s How to Get to Heaven From Belfast

After making her name with the comedy Derry Girls, Lisa McGee has shifted into crime drama with Netflix’s How to Get to Heaven From Belfast. Like recent creators who followed breakthrough comedies with darker projects—Donald Glover, Sterlin Harjo, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge—McGee brings a distinctive voice and a meta sense of humor to a murder-story framework.

The series centers on three women summoned to the wake of an estranged fourth friend, a set-up that unfolds through flashbacks to a night when the girls watched a cabin burn. The central trio—Robyn (Sinéad Keenan), a frazzled mother; Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a guarded, semi-closeted woman; and Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), a writer of a TV crime drama called Murder Code—carry much of the show’s energy with sharp dialogue, comic timing, and an eye for how stories reshape real people.

The mystery broadens in the second half, and the plot grows at times overly large and tonal shifts don’t always land, with trauma edging out some of McGee’s more specific observations.

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