(courtesy First Showing (c) Netflix)
Think tightrope walkers have a challenge on their hands?
Surely a greater feat is balancing comedy and drama in a show like How to Get to Heaven From Belfast – the title alone is redolent with quirky humour and melancholic longing, all in perfect unison – ensuring both get their moment to shine without outshining the other.
Thankfully Lisa McGee, the person behind How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, also served up the tonal delights of Derry Girls, her deft hand clearly at work in her new eight-episode show which is full to the brim with craic-inducing snappy oneliners, humour-laden observances and a metric ton of moments that wrench your heart and tear at your soul.
This is television, and yes, it’s still television even on a streaming platform thank you, that sends you soaring, gets you laughing and makes you feel so many things, sometimes even in the same scene, and which definitely leaves an impact, something that cannot be said for many bingeable entities.
Set in Belfast in Northern Ireland and county Donegal just over the north-west border in the Irish Republic, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast focuses on three close high school friends, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) who, twenty years after their last days in the classroom, find themselves summoned by a mysterious email to Country Donegal for the wake of the fourth estranged member of their once-tight group, Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe).
If you think that would be a sobering summons you’d be right, but what becomes immediately apparent upin meeting these three are two salient things – these three friends, all of whom have various life challenges, cannot get by without throwing witty, heavily-barbed oneliners at each other, and there is a great big honkin’ secret that drove them apart from Greta and which might be about to bust wide open when they head to Donegal.
What we do know from the hugely entertaining trailer – and honestly who says that much of the time but good lord if ever a tool of marketing did justice to that which it is advertising, it’s this gem – is that there’s a great big painful shared past past none of the three wish to excavate, that Greta is NOT in the coffin at the wake, which by the way, is weirdly under-attended and that she’s out there somewhere needing the help of three friends who find themselves in a whole world of trouble.
Someone is trying to kill them – take a bow Bronagh Gallagher as Booker who excels as a shadowy figure of menace whom it turns out, is nowhere near as cardboard cutout a character as you might think – a policeman aka Garda/tow truck driver is trying to help them, and maybe even sleep with one of them (the delectable Darragh Hand as Liam) and various people are trying to get at the truth, hide the truth or try to figure out what the hell is going on.
It’s a mystery that has a huge number of intriguing and entertaining parts, very few of which can be revealed with spoilers aplenty bursting out in messy and unwanted multitudinous abundance, so many laughs, many of which come courtesy of the deft mix of the surreal, the absurd and the quirkily human, and a deep sense of humanity that lies open like an open wound.
How to Get to Heaven From Belfast is a show with a lot going on, humour and drama battling it out for narrative dominance and heft which brings all its various elements together so well that what should feel like disparate elements summon a mighty and cohesive whole.
And while there are times in a bingeing frenzy when you might feel the need to hit “next episode” simply because it’s there, when it comes to How to Get to Heaven From Belfast you’ll be racing to get to the next instalment of a story that blends so much together and yet still feels like the one story and not cobbled together parts of a dubious whole.
While dramedies have a largely bad name, with many of them failing to transcend their Frankenstein’d parts, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast doesn’t just bring it all together like it’s always been together, but it dances between the amusingly whimsical and the deeply affecting with the alacrity of a gymnast in their prime.
Take a scene in one of the later episodes when Greta, again very much alive though her husband Owen (Emmett J. Scanlan) and mother Margo (Michelle Fairley) is alone with one of Booker’s assistants, bubblegum-coloured wig-wearing wearing Harujuku Girl manic pixie charmer Feeney (Saoirse-Monica Jackson, a Derry Girls alum).
To all appearances, and all we’ll say is those appearances are deceiving, this is a captor and captive situation, but while Feeney is all kinds of manic weird and bubbly strangeness, she also exhibits an unexpected tenderness tenderness to Greta, with both a menacing air and an idiosyncratic sense of fun breathing the same narrative air and very much feeling part of the same affecting whole.
Or anyone of the moments when three main characters are trying to keep their day-to-day lives humming along while heading off around Ireland trying to figure out why their past has come rushing up to greet and mock them and how it is that Greta is dead/not dead and what on earth can behind it all.
How to Get to Heaven From Belfast is an absolute joy, deep diving into the way past decisions can come back to haunt you, how friendships can prevail even after a huge amount of time has passed and how where we are in life might feel rock solid but can be disrupted with just perfectly timed email or phone call.
This is a show that has it all – a crackingly brisk but emotionally intimate plot, superb performances (especially from the three absolutely spot-on leads who deliver every line and live every emotion to perfection), a mystery so intriguing and layered you will be feel hugely satisfied when it’s all solved and happy to hang in there while it’s not, and a sense of riotous comedy and heart-searing emotion coming together, co-existing and going somewhere magnificent without putting a foot wrong.
It’s as close to the perfect show as you’re going to get and will fill a viewing hole you didn’t know you had, leaving you amused, saddened, overjoyed and dramatically impacted over eight impressively wrought episodes that will all but demand to be watched again and soon, and yes, you will, of course, like an inquisitive Saoirse, comply and be happy you did.
How to Get to Heaven From Belfast streams on Netflix.