Derry Girls

My family moved to Northern Ireland, in 1968, while my Father, who was in the US Air Force, was in Vietnam. This program revives much of the experience my sisters and I had in grammar school, there (albeit we were Protestants in County Down and a generation before).

Being a non-Irish man in my 40s I'm clearly not in the key demographic, but I really enjoyed this show. It felt a bit too broad and farcical for my tastes in the beginning, but it got better. The acting is solid throughout. I watched the whole thing in two days and am looking forward to season 3.

This was an absolute TREAT. I did not know what to expect when I started watching this but after 2 or 3 scenes, I knew I was gonna binge watch this. I dont feel like The Troubles is a historical event that has been touched on very often in popular culture. That´s why I found it so refreshing to see it in a comedic way through the eyes of Derry teenagers.

The writing was spot on, you could never tell what was going to happen or what someone was going to say. Everything was just surprisingly hilarious all the time. If you can overlook the fact that the actors who are playing the teenagers are around ten years older than they should be, then you´ll find their performances convincing. Some of them overacted sometimes (Erin´s character is a little unnatural) but since the whole show is a bit nutty it kind of works.

I'd almost given up on TV sit-coms, in fact the last one I really enjoyed was "The I.T. Guys" and how many years ago was that? Anyway, it was my wife who alerted me to this series and a quick look at the first two episodes of the second series found me looking up series one which she'd already watched and I have to say she wasn't wrong, as I found it absolutely hilarious.

It reminded me of so many of my favourite sit-coms, like "Father Ted", naturally, "Press Gang" and yes, "The I.T. Guys", but it still has its own identity. Set in early 1990's Derry in Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement came into place, it concerns the misadventures of a group of five young friends, four female and Irish, one male and English and by extension their eccentric families.

It makes clever use of the political and religious backdrop for the comedy, the families in question being Roman Catholics living in the predominantly Protestant town of Derry, so that one episode has the hapless family attempting to head for a weekend in the country while an Orange Walk is in full swing, while another sees the young gang claim to have had holy visions in a chapel, with a statue of the Virgin Mary apparently "smirking" at them.

The situations are amusingly set up, but it's the rapid-fire gags, often near-the-knuckle, which had me creasing myself as well as the individual characterisations themselves. I don't know who my favourite is amongst them but the central character of Erin, with her teenage crushes, literary pretensions and down-to-earth sensibilities probably shades it, although the hormonally imbalanced Michelle, uber-enthusiastic Clare and ditzy Orla and doormat James run her close and all get their share of the good lines on offer, not to mention their dysfunctional parents and grandparents too.

All the episodes I've watched were of the same high standard with the only difficulty sometimes being the machine-gun-like Northern Irish delivery which can be a bit hard to pick up sometimes. That said I'm getting more than enough laughs from what I can see and hear so I'm not complaining too much.

To all those many millions more people currently watching the appallingly bad "Mrs Brown's Boys" do yourself a favour and switch to this immediately.

Hilarious, quick, quirky and brilliantly written. Funniest thing on Netflix. Set in Northern Ireland during the troubles, the jokes come from all directions-family, growing up, fitting in, Catholic schools, the folly of religious conflicts, and on and on. Lisa McGee has created a phenomenal show populated with engagingly funny characters everywhere you turn.