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IRISH AND PROFANE

Hi­lar­i­ous sit­u­a­tions and mar­vel­lous di­a­logues, as well as mem­o­rable per­for­mances from a group of un­known young ac­tors, are enough rea­sons to give a sec­ond chance to the British se­ries Derry Girls, which had gone un­no­ticed in its pre­miere on Net­flix last year, al­though it was a big hit in Great Britain, and es­pe­cially in North­ern Ire­land, with an au­di­ence share of over 60%. The re­views are also unan­i­mous and con­sider it one of the best come­dies to have been broad­cast on tele­vi­sion re­cently. Now Net­flix has just re­leased the sec­ond sea­son, which con­tin­ues to re­late the daily life of a group of teenagers from Derry — Lon­don­derry for British union­ists — dur­ing the 1990s, amid the North­ern Ire­land con­flict. That an acidic and shame­less com­edy can be made set in that con­text and at that time is a sign that some wounds are still heal­ing. The first episode be­gins with the start of the school year, the day the IRA de­cides to place a bomb on one of the bridges of the town, forc­ing peo­ple to make de­tours from their usual routes. “I’m pretty sure in­ter­fer­ing with your sunbed ses­sions isn’t very high on any­one’s po­lit­i­cal agenda,” one of the main char­ac­ters, Erin, replies to her aunt when she com­plains about the headache the de­tours have caused.

At this start of the school year, Erin meets her friends on the way to school — a girls only re­li­gious school — and dis­cov­ers that one of them, Michelle, is ac­com­pa­nied by her cousin James. And she’s not sur­prised that he’s a boy, but that he speaks in such a strange way. It turns out that James is British — his mother went to Lon­don for an abor­tion but has now re­turned with him 16 years later. Fear­ing that his phys­i­cal safety might be in dan­ger if he goes to school with Irish boys, the local au­thor­i­ties enrol him with the girls. Thus, James ends up be­com­ing a kind of ap­pen­dix to this group of girls with crazy ideas that can­not stop get­ting into trou­ble and live their lives de­spite the po­lit­i­cal chal­lenges of the times.

In the six episodes of sea­son one, we find all kinds of ref­er­ences to the pe­riod — start­ing with the sound­track, which in­cludes songs by Madonna, REM, The Cran­ber­ries, Gen­e­sis, The Corrs... — which make the ex­ag­ger­ated mis­chief and mis­un­der­stand­ings brought about by the girls ac­tu­ally seem cred­i­ble and, above all, ex­tremely funny. Be­cause this is a se­ries to watch un­crit­i­cally — per­haps the girls do look a lit­tle older than they are sup­posed to be — and in which to enjoy the nos­tal­gia of an era free from mo­bile phones, not as long ago as it might seem. Some men­tion is also due to re­li­gion: the episode in which the girls pre­tend they have wit­nessed a mir­a­cle to avoid an exam they have not stud­ied for is un­miss­able — as the tears from a statue of the Vir­gin Mary prove to be of less than di­vine ori­gin.

derry girls Creator: Lisa McGee, a playwright who has used her own experiences — she was born in Derry — to write this series. Main actors: Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Louisa Harland, Nicola Coughlan, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell and Dylan Llewellyn
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