How to Get to Heaven from Belfast Review

McGee's first series since Derry Girls ended is not a sequel to it, and the first thing to report is that the jokes are still the fastest going. Three women who have known each other since school drive to Donegal for the wake of the fourth, Greta, who walked out of their lives years ago. The body in the coffin is not Greta. What follows is eight hours of mystery plotting with a secret from their teenage years buried underneath, told in a register that can swing from farce to real dread inside one scene.

Roisin Gallagher carries it as Saoirse, a television writer who narrates her own life badly, and Sinead Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne play equals rather than sidekicks, which is why the friendship reads as thirty years old instead of eight episodes old. Michael Lennox, who directed most of Derry Girls, takes the opening stretch and keeps the comedy quick enough that the horror lands when it finally stops.

Michelle Fairley is excellent and underused. The flaws are structural. The mystery is stretched thinner than eight hours can bear, the flashbacks to the younger versions explain things the present day scenes had already landed, and the thriller turn late on asks for a tension the show is too fond of its characters to sustain. Critics were warm and a minority were not, and both are right. It is a comedy with a corpse in it, and the comedy wins.