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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. The Netflix series "How To Get To Heaven From Belfast" is a comic mystery about three longtime friends investigating the death of another mutual old friend. The show was created by Lisa McGee, who brought us the cult hit "Derry Girls." Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says he was a bit slow getting to the series, which dropped last month, but he found it such rollicking fun that he simply had to praise it.
JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: When I first discovered stories as a kid, I was in love with plot. I was thrilled by the way that everything could slide so neatly into place. But as I watched and read more, the thrill began to vanish. Plots began to feel like freeways - great for moving you along efficiently, but all pretty much the same. And in truth, you can't see much of life from there. You're better off on the streets, back roads and alleyways.
Someone who grasps this is Lisa McGee, the Northern Irish screenwriter who had an international hit with "Derry Girls," a beloved teen comedy series set during the violent Troubles of the late-'90s. This time out, McGee has turned her unruly sensibility to a crime show. The result, Netflix's "How To Get To Heaven From Belfast," is a madcap riff on the murder mystery. Vastly entertaining and flagrantly Irish, the show serves up so many different tones that it's like watching one of those performers who can juggle a chainsaw, a puppy and a bowl of Jell-O while playing a banjo with their teeth.
The story centers on three late 30s Belfast women who've been friends since going to Catholic school together. There's Saoirse, played by Roisin Gallagher, a tireless fantasist who created a hit cop show that even she thinks is stupid. There's Robyn - that's Sinead Keenan - a bossy, foul-mouthed, bourgeois mother of three. Imagine an Irish Reese Witherspoon. And there's Dara, played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, a lovelorn lesbian who might seem like a drip - she's stuck caring for her mom - except that Dunne gives her the quiet drollery of a Buster Keaton or Stan Laurel.
The three hear about the death of their estranged school friend, Greta, with whom they have long shared a dark, potentially ruinous secret. And so they head down to scenic County Donegal to pay their respects. But they quickly realize there's something suspicious about Greta's death. At Saoirse's urging - she writes crime shows, after all - they begin to dig. Naturally, trouble follows. Soon they're dealing with everyone from Booker - she's an enigmatically murderous outlaw - to Liam, a member of the Irish Garda, or police, who they fear will learn their secret.
Now, I worry this description may make the show sound like a cozily routine murder mystery. It's anything but. As the show leaps between past and present, our heroines rocket from one loony scene to the next. They see ghosts. They have car crashes - yes, more than one. They find themselves in funerals, five-star Portuguese resorts, abandoned lighthouses, yachts, golf carts, jails, religious processions, country and western nights at a pub where women dress as Dolly Parton. Not to mention, a St. Patrick's Day parade bursting with the screwball exuberance of a Preston Sturges movie.
Here, fleeing the menacing Booker, they hide in a line of people queuing up to see the Irish equivalent of "The Tonight Show." Saoirse doesn't want to go in, but Robyn explains why they have to, then bluffs the woman who's taking the tickets.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST")
SINEAD KEENAN: (As Robyn) She can't kill us on live TV.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) OK, can you guys move aside, please?
KEENAN: (As Robyn) We don't have tickets because these are the competition winners.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) What are you talking about?
KEENAN: (As Robyn) Should be on your list. Jesus, I emailed about this yesterday. What list are you working from? Who put you on the door?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Kara.
KEENAN: (As Robyn) Oh, typical. Aye. Well, tell me that you at least held some house seats back?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Yeah, of course. Always.
KEENAN: (As Robyn) Good. So shall we?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Tickets?
KEENAN: (As Robyn) Seen a lot of "30 Rock."
POWERS: The opening episodes of "How To Get To Heaven From Belfast" are so gleefully freewheeling that it's a tad disappointing when later on, it serves up some obligatory crime show stuff. You know, explaining the murder, drawing a moral, et cetera. The show is at its best when it's most anarchic. Luckily, McGee is less interested in the creaky mechanisms of mystery plotting than in conjuring up a giddily surreal world, one that weds some of David Lynch's sense of teenage darkness to an anti-comic style akin to the Marx Brothers.
The show is teeming with garrulous Irish folk whose crazy dialogue just sings. None more so than Robyn, niftily played by Keenan, a buzzing beehive of a woman who fires off obscene and blasphemous lines like a rapper. The glue that holds all the lunacy together is the decades-old friendship of its heroines. Here are women who know how to annoy, wound and manipulate each other. They bicker hilariously.
Although they've grown up and gone their separate ways, they're still living out feelings and experiences they shared back when they were teens in their school uniforms, a period to which the show keeps flashing back. We see the adult Saoirse, Robyn and Dara in their younger selves, each living out a destiny that feels almost preordained both in its trajectory and its frustrations. With devoutly unsentimental, Irish good cheer, McGee reminds us that they carry the past with them always.
BIANCULLI: John Powers reviewed the Netflix series "How To Get To Heaven From Belfast." On Monday's show, a new book about Stephen Sondheim draws on archives and letters that offer new insights into his music, his relationship with his collaborators and his often toxic relationship with his mother, including the letter she wrote to him that's known to Sondheim fans as the letter. We'll talk with the author, Daniel Okrent. Join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S "LAST MIDNIGHT (INSTRUMENTAL)")
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(SOUNDBITE OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S "LAST MIDNIGHT (INSTRUMENTAL)")
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