A Love Letter to Derry Girls, the Show That Reminds Us Why Life’s Worth Living
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The post A Love Letter to Derry Girls, the Show That Reminds Us Why Life’s Worth Living appeared first on Consequence.
Deep in the endless scroll of Netflix’s catalog, there exists a tiny little show called Derry Girls. It felt like something of an outlier when I discovered it in the fall of 2019 — just two seasons of six, twenty-minute episodes each — but I pressed play out of sheer curiosity. You know, the kind of curiosity that hits you when you’ve run out of anything to watch and decide on a whim to start something entirely new and entirely original.
Set in the town of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Derry Girls debuted in 2018 and tells the story of a group of teenagers coming of age in the 1990s. And yet it almost feels disrespectful to parse this lovely, little show down to a simple logline. Because at its heart, it’s so much more than that.
I fell in love with the world of Derry Girls almost instantly, from the second the opening notes of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” started playing under the narration provided by 16-year-old Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson)’s diary. And by the time the premiere ended with a madcap tornado involving detention, a dead nun, stolen lipstick, an abandoned hunger strike and the aforementioned diary acting as the episode’s proverbial Chekov’s gun that sets the whole thing in motion, I was sold hook, line, and sinker.
See, Erin and her friends — her delightfully kooky cousin Orla (Louisa Harland); bleeding heart hypochondriac Clare (Nicola Coughlan); rebellious, foul-mouthed, perpetually horny Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) and Michelle’s perpetually put-down English transplant of a cousin, James (Dylan Llewellyn) — may see themselves as a band of outsiders. But they’re actually the coolest kids at Our Lady Immaculate College, though that’s probably a fact they won’t realize for another good six or seven years.
For now, though, they’re stuck growing up in a world where nothing ever comes easily. Not sneaking to Belfast for a Take That concert or paying for the class trip to Paris. Not taking over the school paper or performing step aerobics in the school talent show. And yet, despite these struggles, little do they know that things in life will probably also never be any better.
If you’re like me, Derry Girls may even teach you a key bit of history. It’s almost embarrassing to admit now — though not quite as embarrassing to Michelle as having an English cousin — but I only learned that Northern Ireland was a separate country from, you know, Ireland Ireland thanks to the show.
And while I aced AP US History, it turns out I was rather woefully uneducated about the North Ireland conflict — known more colloquially as The Troubles — which serves as the larger backdrop against which the Derry Girls’ hijinks and misadventures are set. The girls, James included, have to worry about all the universal milestones of adolescence like prom and finals and figuring out who they are, all while also worrying about daily bomb threats and buddying up with the Children of Cherynobl and the occasional state visit from President Clinton.
(Though if you are like me, don’t worry: you’ll get a crash course of context in the premiere when Erin fruitlessly tries to reason with her mom that A) Macaulay Culkin is not some friend she met at her “Friends Across the Barricades” summer program and B) Macaulay Culkin is not a Protestant. Well, as far as she knows anyway.)
The music is another thing to love about the show, providing a perfect time capsule for the mid-’90s that’s only been matched in recent memory by Hulu’s PEN15 doing the same thing for the Y2K era. And while The Cranberries’ “Dreams” serves as a de facto, though unofficial, theme song for the series, there’s plenty more to jam out to, from The Corrs and Take That to Vanilla Ice and Boyzone. Plus, the show’s second season will give new meaning to “Rock the Boat” by The Hues Corporation that you’ll never be able to forget.
I binged Derry Girls for the first time in the fall of 2019. But I didn’t realize then that the show would soon become my vital form of televised comfort food when I decided to start over from the beginning about six months later. During the pandemic, it was one of the only shows I could consistently rely on to feel something. Sure, I also binged plenty of One Tree Hill, Veep and the Great British Baking Show. I rewatched Sex and the City, Dexter, and Married to Medicine in their entirety.
But no other show helped me remember to live life, even when it feels like the world is falling apart around you and everything is spiraling out of control. That sometimes, the only things that make your troubles feel less troublesome are the friends who know you the best and your favorite ‘90s song. That there’s humor and heart to be found in the absurdities of day-to-day life as global events sometimes happen to play out in your own backyard.
Seeing the Derry Girls rally around Clare after she decides to come out as a lesbian via a school essay competition, or finally accept James as an official “Derry Girl” after two seasons’ worth of lovable hazing, will restore anyone’s faith in humanity, even just a little. So for that, I’ll always have Derry Girls to thank.
The third season will be the series’ final batch of episodes, delivered after a painfully long three-year wait. (In the interim, Nicola Coughlan, who plays Clare, even found her way onto Bridgerton as Penelope Featherington.) But thankfully, we get one extra episode at the end of the season, in the form of a 48-minute epilogue that will flash forward to Erin and Orla’s joint 18th birthday on the eve of the Good Friday referendum that brought the Troubles to a close.
All the best coming-of-age stories come to an end and seeing the Derry Girls on the brink of adulthood is no different. But the journey, which led the girls through war, Catholic school, and the occasional hash-filled scone, was nothing but a rare delight.
The third season of Derry Girls is streaming now on Netflix.
A Love Letter to Derry Girls, the Show That Reminds Us Why Life’s Worth Living
Glenn Rowley
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