Legen-Derry

In the age of streaming, American television has gradually come to look a lot more like British television, with more series sporting shortened seasons and limited runs. At the same time, this is also the age of the franchise -- so it can be a bit jarring to come across a show that, in true British fashion, is only here for a handful of episodes and then gone. I recently found one in Derry Girls.

Derry Girls is a half-hour sitcom (no audience, no laugh track) set in 1990s Ireland, during the final years of the Northern Ireland conflict. Four Irish teens attend a girls' Catholic school (with their one male friend, who's English, and an exception to the enrollment rules). They navigate commonplace problems and local terrorist threats in equal measure, mostly oblivious to how pivotal a time they're living in.

Many a popular sitcom reaches their popular status on the back of one breakout character that takes over the series and passes into the collective zeitgeist. The truly transcendent sitcoms have not just one, but a whole cast of contrasting and fun characters. Derry Girls is very much in that mold. The core five teens of the show run the archetypal gamut from vain to ditzy to neurotic to horny to exasperated. Much of the comedy stems from the fact that you quickly learn how each character will react in a given situation... and then they act even more in the way you expect.

At the same time, the characters don't feel like caricatures. While the background of the Northern Ireland conflict is never brought so much to the fore that it threatens the comedic tone, it is still a backdrop of the real problems of real life, and it simply wouldn't work to have completely unrealistic characters layered on top. So while these characters are certainly heightened, they do feel like real people. There are plenty of jokes in Derry Girls, but the characters themselves are not "the joke."

They're supported by an expansive supporting cast that you come to know as well as the girls themselves. Here on the periphery, the characters are allowed to be a bit more broad and silly, and so you get plenty of the awkward family dynamics of two of the girls (whose families are related and live together). You get the surly antics of the school's headmistress. You get the hilarious cringe of the class suck-ups. Before you know it, you get a sense of this small town, and it feels familiar.

And it all happens in just three seasons, over 19 episodes that (with the exception of the double-length family) run just 20 to 25 minutes. That there's so little of Derry Girls quickly made me come to regard it as a precious candy to be made to last for a long time. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of what Netflix, the U.S. home for Derry Girls, would want of me -- but the show was actually made in the U.K. by Channel 4, immune to the streaming bean-counters.

Derry Girls is a show that creates its own quirky little world -- it's a Cheers, a Parks and Recreation, a Letterkenny. It has its own language you must learn to speak... and in learning a new language, you can travel to a new place you couldn't have gone before. I was delighted by the series, and give it an A-. Even in this age of "too many worthy things to stream," I feel like most people could (and should) make time for it.