★★★★☆
Nostalgia is the currency of popular television these days. From Mad Men to The Wonder Years, TV shows playing with themes of the past have been staples of the small screen. Now that decades like the ’90s are considered “vintage,” it only makes sense that they are memorialized in the form of the sitcom.
Derry Girls takes up this mantle.
The show gets the ending it deserves with season three. It’s funny, sweet, and aware of its meaning—a quality that a lot of sitcoms lack as of late. The nostalgia coursing through the veins of the show is heart-warming and, at times, tear-jerking, much like the experience of being a teenager in itself.
The latest season of Derry Girls, set in 1996 Londonderry, Northern Ireland, came to Netflix on Oct. 7 with the same beloved cast from the first season. Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Orla (Louisa Harland), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), and the lone Brit, cousin James (Dylan Llewellyn) are back for the third and final time.
Unsurprisingly, they are up to the usual tricks of past seasons.
Methodically in every episode, the gang falls into mishap after misadventure, peppered by the show’s trademark laugh-out-loud humor and wry observations about the Northern Ireland conflict, known colloquially as the Troubles.
Much like the previous two seasons of Derry Girls, this season combines the brevity of its episodes with the gravity of life as a Catholic teenager living in Northern Ireland. The show achieves this balance in a tasteful and scrappy way. The show’s production is on par with previous seasons, but there’s just nothing particularly revolutionary about Derry Girls’ third season.
The formulaic nature of the sitcom is both comforting and a bit exhausting—there can never be any rest in dialogue or action. As soon as they solve one problem, the girls get themselves right into the next one, then the next and so forth. The repeated action may deter audiences from bingeing the show.
In the second episode—rather plainly titled “The Affair”—a standard miscommunication about the whereabouts of Erin’s mother, Mary (Tara Lynne O’Neill), propels the entire narrative forward, a plot convention that the creators already used in previous seasons.
What sets Derry Girls apart from its peers, however, is the sheer wit of the writing, particularly with the character of Sister George Michael (Siobhán McSweeney). Sister Michael is easily the funniest character on Derry Girls. Her distaste for her students and clerical counterparts alone elicits laughter in every scene. McSweeney returns to this series with full force, going back to her character’s dry roots.
Though viewers will miss getting new installments of the beloved characters’ adventures, the show will live on for years to come.
