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When a storyteller has made their magnum opus—a work that brilliantly synthesizes their experience and voice and most profound insights, a tale only they could tell—what are they supposed to do next? Many of the past decade’s smartest TV creators have, in response to this impossible problem, turned to a life of crime. Donald Glover followed up the category-exploding Atlanta with serial-killer standom satire Swarm and a tragicomic take on Mr. & Mrs. Smith, about married assassins. After rendering a contemporary Native American community in specific, surreal, often hilarious detail in Reservation Dogs, Sterlin Harjo turned to noir with The Lowdown. Phoebe Waller-Bridge plumbed the darkly comic depths of sex-positive feminism in the first season of Fleabag, only returning to the project after creating the deliriously fun cat-and-mouse spy thriller Killing Eve.
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Like those auteurs, Lisa McGee broke through with a sui generis comedy that mined aspects of her own experience to find authentic humor in a harrowing situation. Derry Girls, which followed teens in McGee’s native Derry in the years preceding 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, was a raucous, joke-dense show that juxtaposed mundane adolescent rites of passage with the daily horrors of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Now McGee, too, is back with a crime drama—one bound to earn comparisons to Sharon Horgan’s post-Catastrophe murder romp, Bad Sisters. Combining the latter show’s core of complicated relationships between women (and its fondness for outfitting those women in enviable knitwear) with the sidesplittingly verbose, extremely Irish sensibility of Derry Girls, her new Netflix series How to Get to Heaven From Belfast lands as both an example of the pivot to crime drama and a commentary on it. The plot gets a bit woolly towards the end, the mix of tones doesn’t always work, and I sometimes wished I could watch its central girlfriends do anything besides…
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