Derry Girls

Lisa McGee's Derry Girls launched on Channel 4 in January 2018 and ran for three seasons until 2022. The series became one of the most internationally exported pieces of British television comedy of its decade and consolidated McGee, a Derry-born screenwriter, as one of the most important comic writers in contemporary British and Irish television. The series's ratings broke Channel 4 records on its first broadcast.

Five chaotic teenagers, Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Orla McCool (Louisa Harland), Clare Devlin (Nicola Coughlan, in the role that launched her into international stardom before Bridgerton), Michelle Mallon (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), and the English boy James Maguire (Dylan Llewellyn), navigate Catholic-girls' grammar school, adolescence and family life in 1990s Derry during the final years of the Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement provides the third-season's historical anchor.

The series's structural masterstroke (that the period setting allows comedy about adolescent self-absorption to play out against actual political-historical violence in the background) is what makes the show distinct from any earlier UK or Irish sitcom. McGee's specific Derry idiom (cassette mixtapes, school-corridor politics, parental Tropicana-rationing) and the precision of the period production (the Walls, the soundtrack of 1990s Northern Irish radio) produced a sustained register of regional specificity that rarely makes it into British television. The series's emotional commitment in its closing minutes (particularly the third-season finale) is among the most quietly affecting in 2010s and 2020s British comedy.