With ‘How to Get to Heaven from Belfast’ landing on Netflix this week, creator Lisa McGee (Derry Girls) joined director Michael Lennox (Derry Girls) and stars Roísín Gallagher (The Dry, The Lovers), Sinéad Keenan (Little Boy Blue, Unforgotten) and Caoilfhionn Dunne (A Thousand Blows, Industry) for a post-screening Q&A that offered a deeper look at the chaos, comedy and creeping menace behind the new series.
And yes, it turns out McGee always wanted to write a mystery. Just maybe not one this unhinged.
Moving Beyond ‘Derry Girls’
Although the creative team behind the camera has largely reunited from Derry Girls, McGee was clear that this series represents something slightly different for her.
“It’s been incredible working on this because it’s the exact same team, you know, behind the camera. So to be kind of reunited with them all and to make something a bit more heightened—and I’ve always wanted to have a crack at a mystery. So yeah, it’s been great.”
She has previously described the show as a mash-up of mystery and comedy, and that DNA is all over it. The rhythm, the speed of the dialogue, the sharp turns between absurdity and sincerity all feel familiar, but the stakes are darker and the tone more unpredictable.
The “Sh*t A-Team” Of Belfast
At the centre of the story are childhood friends Saoirse, Robyn and Dara, who find themselves pulled into a bizarre and increasingly dangerous mystery following the death of a former friend.
McGee summed them up perfectly during the Q&A:
“Yeah, they’re like the A-Team but bad.”
She expanded on the idea, comparing their battered “Mom-wagon” to the iconic van from The A-Team.
“You know the way the A-Team van, if anyone’s old enough to remember, like, got cooler and cooler because they would add bits to it? But theirs just gets shittier and shittier because they keep messing it up.”
That energy of well-meaning chaos runs through the series. These are not slick detectives. They are messy, stubborn, loyal and frequently making everything worse.
Balancing Laughs With The Sinister
One of the biggest challenges discussed on stage was managing the tonal shifts between broad comedy and genuine unease.
McGee admitted it took some adjustment coming from the joke-dense world of Derry Girls.
“One thing that we found quite early on is that we had to lose some jokes, which was devastating because we were so used to packing Derry Girls full of jokes. But if you didn’t let the creepier stuff breathe a bit, the comedy just undermines it, you know?”
Lennox added that testing the tone in production was key, with music playing “such an important role in sort of navigating the tone out of these sort of two extremes.”
It is that tightrope walk between motor-mouth comedy and sudden silence that gives the show its edge.
Writing Women Who’ve Lived A Bit
Unlike Derry Girls, which centred on teenagers, this series focuses on women in their late 30s, still bound by school friendships but very much shaped by adult life.
For McGee, the motivation was simple.
“I really wanted to write something I would watch, you know? And I really believe that me and my friends would… well, I like to think we’d be brilliant at solving a mystery, you know? But I know we’d probably just make it worse and worse, like the gang do.”
She added that she wanted to see women “get to go on an adventure and be messy and chaotic and make bad decisions,” because “the grey areas are sometimes the most interesting.”
It is a refreshing shift. These characters are not polished or aspirational. They are complicated, contradictory and very funny.
Chemistry, Cars & Open Microphones
The cast also shared stories about their first chemistry read-through, which involved plastic chairs arranged to resemble a car.
Keenan recalled the surreal setup, while Dunne admitted she “knew” they had nailed it from the reaction in the room. McGee confirmed that the chemistry was obvious almost immediately, saying they “just looked like a group of friends that were about to start arguing immediately.”
Much of that bond developed during long hours filming in the show’s battered vehicle, sometimes with a microphone very much still switched on.
According to the cast, the sound operator repeatedly reminded them: “Just so you know, girls, that microphone is on. It’s on all the time.”
Some things are clearly best left off the record.
A Love Letter To Northern Ireland
While the show is contemporary and not directly about the Troubles, McGee spoke movingly about setting it in Belfast and the idea of living alongside the past.
“I always felt the most powerful thing about being from where we’re from and the story that you never see very often was the ordinary people day in, day out, going about their business… all these wee small victories every day, you know?”
She described the series as “a love letter” to those ordinary lives, even as it plays with themes of ghosts, secrets and buried history.
“It’s so cool to film in Belfast where these kind of ghosts are everywhere… I don’t think you can separate yourself from the past really, you know?”
With sharp humour, escalating mystery and what McGee herself calls “shit A-Team” energy, this looks set to be another distinctly Northern Irish hit with international bite.
‘How to Get to Heaven from Belfast’ premieres Thursday, 12th February 2026 on Netflix.
Login to Geektown