If we’re honest about it, even the most absurdly comical coming-of-age stories have the ability to shift quite seamlessly into the in-between territory of dramedy, because growing up is, by its very nature, both sad and breathtakingly silly. John Hughes made films about kids who got trapped under glass coffee tables at parties, but he also made films about lost kids worried that their hearts would die as they age. The teens of Freaks and Geeks, perhaps the most reliable template by which all other 21st-century teen dramedies are measured, faced true heartbreak and turmoil while being the most painfully, awkwardly hilarious kids on TV at the time. Adolescence morphs every emotion we have into an outsized, mythic thing so that while the joy is undeniably potent, the pain – however momentary – is too.
I mention all this because, at first glance, Derry Girls perhaps doesn’t lend itself to the dramedy label. Lisa McGee’s acclaimed series about five teens growing up in early ‘90s Northern Ireland is celebrated for its laugh-a-minute cadence, playful riffs on high school archetypes, and often wacky internal mythology, even as it unfolds in a city where soldiers are never far away from the main characters thanks to the ongoing Troubles. The Troubles are present, yes, but the characters often treat them the same way some of us might treat road construction on our commute: As an inconvenience on their way to work, or to find a date for an upcoming dance. Though many dramedies might settle for the kind of comedy that makes you smile through the tears, Derry Girls is very much a laughter-first show.
Look closer, though, and you’ll see a series of surprising emotional depth, a show that somehow captures a certain magical truth about growing up: That sometimes if you’re lucky, you find a handful of people who truly understand you in ways no one else ever will.
This begins with Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), the show’s de facto protagonist, who we meet for the first time not through her own eyes, but through her cousin Orla’s (Louisa Harland) sneaky reading of her diary. It’s a clever choice on McGee’s part to introduce Erin by putting her words in someone else’s mouth because we can immediately understand her as a classic teenage self-mythologizer. For Erin, growing up in Derry surrounded by the Troubles and the ancient city walls is all part of her Grander Story, of a saga she’s sure will one day end in greatness, even if for the moment she has to deal with her cousin sneaking in to read her diary, her mother (Tara Lynn O’Neill) constantly clamoring for the right combination of garments for a load of laundry, and her friends downplaying her own sense of destiny. At one point in Season 2, the show gives us a perfect encapsulation of Erin when her English teacher reads part of a poem she wrote aloud. When she seems unimpressed, Erin helpfully explains:
“It’s about the Troubles, in a political sense, but also about my own troubles in a…personal sense.”
Now the entire room is unimpressed, and Erin is left to make a choice: She can label herself misunderstood and brilliant, or underwhelming and shallow. It’s a choice she has to make again and again throughout the Derry Girls narrative over the course of two seasons so far. Though the perspective sometimes shifts, we’re often seeing the world through Erin’s eyes, and anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows that having to perform that kind of deeply personal reassessment each and every time can be both exhausting and invigorating, depending on which day it is.
But Erin is far from alone in this near-constant struggle for self-determination and affirmation. Her closest friends also walk that same adolescent line throughout the series. It’s perhaps most evident in Clare (Nicole Coughlan), who struggles with constant academic anxiety, a deeply embedded sense of propriety and guilt, and eventually her own sexuality. If Erin is convinced she’s destined for greatness, Clare is convinced that she’s primed for greatness (or at least adequateness) but destined to muck it up in some still-unknown way.
Jamie-Lee O’Donnell perfectly summed up her own character, Michelle, by describing her as a girl who knows full well that she’s the coolest one in her friend group, but if she ventures outside of their bubble that coolness collapses, which makes her content to remain the sex-positive, fashion-forward rebel among misfits. Michelle’s cousin James (Dylan Llewelyn) emerges as an outsider because he’s English, and is assimilated into the group through a strange mixture of verbal barbs and protectiveness from the girls, while he’s left to internally walk in two worlds until he can choose which side of the border he falls on. And then there’s Orla, an eccentric, candy-loving dervish of a character who might be a genius or might be a space case. Either way, she’s managed to carve out her own unique place in the world regardless of what others think of her, and in that way, she represents the ultimate personal success that each of the other four members of the group is striving for.
There’s more to the show than this, of course. As Derry Girls goes on, it expands to include more of the exploits of the larger Quinn household, the town itself, and some of the girls’ more notorious classmates. We get scene-stealing turns from Siobhan McSweeney as the put-upon headmistress Sister Michael and Ian McElhinney as Erin and Orla’s grandfather, Joe. And then, of course, there are the Troubles, which float in and out of the main plot as the series (and the history of the early 1990s) dictates, sometimes on the surface, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the form of an elaborate local parade that the family skips town to avoid. In one of the series’ most memorable moments, at the end of the first season, the adults watch a news report about a bombing, wide-eyed and terrified, while the Girls dance together on a stage at school, blissfully unaware that the background radiation of danger in their lives has just come to the fore. It’s wordless, but for all the incredible dialogue in the show, it might be the best scene in Derry Girls.
Still, these external forces all eventually circle back to serve the essential emotional narrative at the heart of the series, one best exemplified by Erin but also seen in each of the other girls. Coming-of-age stories are dramedies by their nature because everything feels bigger than life, and each day feels like it carries with it the highest possible stakes, whether soldiers are walking beside you on your way to school or you’re just trying to get a boy to like you. By showing us the often clumsy but always hilarious ways each of its title characters exemplify that idea, Derry Girls becomes not just one of the funniest shows you can watch right now, but one of the best dramedies of its era.
