Series

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Name: How to Get to Heaven from Belfast
Director: Lisa McGee
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Mystery
Released: 2026
Cast: Roisin Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Darragh Hand

Lisa McGee · UK / Ireland · 2026

Comedy Drama Mystery 2020s

Three childhood friends from Belfast (now drifting through their forties at very different speeds) are reunited by the suspicious death of a fourth member of their old gang. The funeral pulls them back into a city, a friendship and a shared secret they have spent twenty years trying not to look at directly. Across the journey to a quiet plot of consecrated ground, the three women have one chance to set the past in order before someone else does it for them.

Where to watch

About

Lisa McGee's How to Get to Heaven from Belfast launched on Netflix in February 2026 across eight episodes, the writer-creator's first project since concluding Derry Girls at Channel 4 in 2022, and her most direct return to Northern Ireland on screen. McGee writes every episode of the new series; direction is shared between Michael Lennox (a regular collaborator from Derry Girls and the BAFTA-winning short Boogaloo and Graham) and Roxy McKenna. The production is by Hat Trick Productions for Netflix in association with Northern Ireland Screen.

The cast is led by Roisin Gallagher, BAFTA-winner for the BBC's The Lovers (2023), as Saoirse, alongside Sinéad Keenan (Bad Sisters, Unforgotten) as Robyn and Caoilfhionn Dunne (Pure, The Dry) as Dara. Darragh Hand plays Liam. Cinematography is by Tim Palmer, the long-time Sally Wainwright collaborator (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack); the score is by Anne Nikitin.

Reviews on launch were emphatic: The Guardian and The Independent placed it among the strongest Netflix UK commissions of the year, with particular praise for the way McGee braids her trademark broad Northern Irish comic register with darker mystery-series machinery. Within its first fortnight the series sat in Netflix's UK top ten and was renewed for a second instalment. Roisin Gallagher's central performance has already drawn early-cycle BAFTA TV conversation.