Derry Girls is set in 1990s Northern Ireland, right in the middle of the Troubles, which if you’re not familiar, was a decades-long conflict between communities that killed over three thousand people and made ordinary life — getting on a bus, walking to school, going to the shop — into something you had to think about. The show follows five teenagers, four girls and one boy who tags along by accident, through the chaos and boredom and enormous feelings of being sixteen when history is happening outside your window and you have more pressing concerns, like whether a boy from the other school likes you back.
That tension is the whole thing. That’s what makes it work.
Because the Troubles are always there, in the background and sometimes very much in the foreground, and the girls move through it the way teenagers actually move through difficult things, which is to say, mostly sideways. An army checkpoint becomes a chance to flirt. A peace summit becomes an inconvenient reason the concert might be cancelled. A bomb threat is processed and then filed somewhere behind the more immediate crisis of what everyone’s wearing to the school disco. It’s not that they don’t understand what’s happening. It’s that they’re also sixteen, and being sixteen is its own emergency.
There’s something almost radical about that.
We talk a lot about resilience as if it’s a quality people develop consciously, something they decide to have. But Derry Girls suggests it looks less noble than that. It looks like Erin writing dramatic diary entries while her town is under military occupation. It looks like Michelle making inappropriate comments in the middle of serious situations. It looks like five people sitting in a chip shop after something terrible has happened, not because they’re being brave, but because they’re hungry and also they’re still themselves, even now.
I’ve been thinking about this because the news lately has been — a lot. There are wars happening, and conversations about other wars that might happen, and the kind of slow background dread that hums under everything when you check your phone in the morning and close it again quickly because you already know. And you still have to go to work, and figure out what you’re doing for lunch, and laugh at something your colleague said, and exist in a normal day while knowing that somewhere, things are very much not normal.
The girls in Derry Girls did this every day of their adolescence.
What the show gets right, and what a lot of art about difficult times gets wrong, is that it doesn’t make the girls small in comparison to what’s happening around them. They’re not humbled by the conflict or defined by it. They’re annoying and funny and self-absorbed and deeply loyal and occasionally awful to each other in the specific way that only close friends can be. The Troubles is the wallpaper. They’re the ones living in the room.
Lisa McGee, who wrote the show, grew up in Derry. And there’s something you can only get right if you actually lived it — the way difficult circumstances don’t pause the rest of your personality. You don’t become a vessel for the tragedy. You stay exactly who you are, which sometimes means you’re petty about completely unimportant things on a day when you probably shouldn’t be, and that’s fine, that’s human, that’s what people actually do.
The finale has a moment — and this isn’t really a spoiler, because it’s less a plot point than an image — where real footage of the Good Friday Agreement vote is cut with the girls doing what they’ve done the whole series, which is being completely themselves. It shouldn’t work. It does. It makes something tighten in your chest that you weren’t expecting, because the whole show has quietly been building to the idea that ordinary life is not separate from history, it runs alongside it, and sometimes through it, and somehow survives.
Sitcoms get written off as the lightweight option. The thing you put on when you’re tired, or sad, or you’ve had the kind of day that doesn’t warrant anything that asks too much of you. But Derry Girls earns its comedy honestly, which means when it turns serious, you believe it, and when it goes back to being ridiculous two minutes later, you believe that too.
That’s harder to pull off than it looks.
We’re at a point where the news cycle runs on urgency and the internet runs on reaction and the general vibe of existing is a low-grade exhaustion that’s hard to explain to anyone who asks if you’re okay. Against all of that, there is something specifically useful about a show that says, yes, and also, look at these idiots trying to flirt at a checkpoint. Not because the checkpoint doesn’t matter. Because it does, and they’re still here, still themselves, still laughing.
The audacity of that is kind of the whole point.
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