The Premise
A sitcom from Lisa McGee about four Catholic schoolgirls (and one very lost English cousin) surviving mid-90s Derry during the tail end of the Troubles. Erin, Orla, Clare, and Michelle attend Our Lady Immaculate, a girls' school run by Sister Michael, who has the driest delivery on television. Then Michelle's cousin James gets dropped off from England and, because sending him to the boys' school would get him killed, he's stuck in a plaid skirt with the rest of them. The Troubles are the wallpaper. The show itself is about the world-ending stakes of being fifteen: fancying the wrong boy, sneaking into a Take That concert, lying to your ma. It ran three series on Channel 4 from 2018 to 2022. Netflix has all of it.
The Case For
Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Louisa Harland, Nicola Coughlan, Jamie-Lee O'Donnell and Dylan Llewellyn play these five like they've known each other since primary school, and the ensemble chemistry does most of the heavy lifting. Siobhán McSweeney's Sister Michael is one of the great sitcom deadpans of the last decade. Lisa McGee writes jokes at a genuine density, not the padded modern-comedy pace where you wait ninety seconds for a punchline. The adults are as funny as the teenagers. It uses its era well too: needle-drops from The Cranberries, Salt-N-Pepa, Cyndi Lauper, all sitting on top of news footage the kids are actively ignoring. Half-hour episodes. Eighteen of them total. It doesn't overstay.
The Case Against
The accents are the wall. If you don't turn subtitles on in the first ten minutes you'll spend episode one thinking the dialogue is a foreign language you almost understand. It's also very much a sitcom in shape: bit, escalation, misunderstanding, blowup, resolution. If you want prestige-drama pacing or slow character arcs, that's not the assignment. The Troubles material is handled with real care but always through a kid's-eye lens, which viewers who want a serious history piece will find frustrating. And Clare's storylines lean earnest in a way the rest of the show doesn't.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
Fans of Fleabag, Sex Education, Bottoms, and the good years of Superstore will settle in fast. Anyone who liked The Inbetweeners for the specificity of teenage humiliation will find the female-cousin version here. Bounces: people who won't do subtitles, people who bought in for a Troubles docudrama, and anyone who thinks a sitcom needs to be miserable to matter.
The Ruling
WORTH IT because the craft is real and the show knows exactly what it is. McGee writes tight half-hours with actual punchlines, the ensemble is one of the best-cast comedies of its decade, and the political context is baked into the setting instead of shouted from a soapbox. It could have been a lecture about Northern Ireland. Instead the kids ignore the news and the news is funnier for it. The theme lands because the show earns it through Sister Michael's exhaustion and Erin's diary and Michelle's terrible plans, not through a monologue. It's short, it's dense, it's genuinely funny, and it treats you like you can keep up. That's what a WORTH IT looks like.
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