Greta Burned a Church as a Child

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast,” now streaming on Netflix.

It starts, as so many things in Irish life do, with a wake.

Lisa McGee had wanted to take on the murder mystery genre for years. She just knew she couldn’t do it straight. “I was such a big ‘Murder, She Wrote’ fan,” says the creator of “Derry Girls,” whose semi-autobiographical Troubles-era sitcom became a global phenomenon by refusing to sand down its Northern Irish idiosyncrasies.

“How to Get to Heaven From Belfast” is her answer — an eight-episode Netflix comedy-mystery and her first major project since “Derry Girls” concluded in 2022. Three childhood best friends, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), are summoned to rural County Donegal after learning their estranged fourth, Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), has died. Except Greta may not be dead. And Greta, it turns out, has secrets stretching back to a childhood religious commune, an abusive leader and a church that burned down with children inside.

The three women are not equipped to handle any of this. They handle it anyway — badly, loudly and, somehow, hilariously. They get locked in a confessional, blow up a boat and stumble into an underground women’s relocation network run by a quasi-assassin with a flexible attitude toward killing men. Though the darkness of the material never swamps the comedy, a balance McGee calibrated deliberately — less interested in the whodunit than in the women fumbling through it. “The idea of finding nearly the worst people to solve this thing was very amusing to me,” she tells Variety.

Below, McGee breaks down the making of “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast” from its murder-mystery beginnings to the unlikely heroes at its heart.

This show has a lot going on genre-wise. How do you describe what the show actually is?

I saw someone describe it recently as a murder mystery, but then add “has there even been a murder?” — which I thought was quite good. The deaths aren’t your classic murders. I’ve been calling it a comedy mystery, because it’s a mash-up of those two tones. What I always hoped was that people are trying to piece a puzzle together while laughing. That was my ambition for it.

You’ve said you wanted to do your version of “Murder, She Wrote” — but with three women who aren’t good at it. Why did incompetence feel like the right way in?

Those old mystery shows must have been incredibly difficult to write — so technical. I always wanted to have a crack at it because I was such a big “Murder, She Wrote” fan. But I knew I’d have to do it my way. My tone is fast and chaotic and Irish and funny. So the idea of finding nearly the worst people to solve this thing was very amusing to me. They get there in the end, but they really have to learn to trust their instincts. I just loved the idea of life getting in the way — you’re trying to be Jessica Fletcher, but you also have to sort out your kid’s birthday party.

The show taps into the true crime obsession that’s dominated the last decade, and the audience is overwhelmingly women. Why do you think that is?

That’s the question, isn’t it? I do not know why women are so fascinated by it, and I talk about it a lot with my friends. This is so depressing, but I wonder if it’s because most of the crimes are happening to women, so we’re trying to find out as much as we can about what is out there — like, no surprises for us if we know all the scary things that could possibly happen. That’s the depressing take.

The other take might be that women think they can sort shit out. Like, “I could solve it.” Me and my friends think we could solve these things, and we absolutely couldn’t. We’d be as bad as the guards in this show. But in my experience, the biggest true crime fans I know are all my female friends.

You joke that you and your friends think you could figure these things out — are Saoirse, Robyn and Dara based on your real friends?

They’re very much based on my real friendship group, yeah. I have a very glam mom of four who’s very forthright, takes no nonsense — that’s Robyn. And I have a much softer, gentler friend who looks after people, likes to care for people, a little bit eccentric too — that’s Dara. We do go on these trips together. We haven’t had to solve a murder yet, but we live in hope.

And Saoirse — the television writer — is she you?

She was a way in, definitely. I could understand her career frustrations, her chaotic approach to life. But she’s 100 times more interesting than me — she’s got a lot more going on. There’s a point where she ceases to be me and becomes her own thing. But it was how I could start to get my head under the story.

Greta is the central mystery but she’s barely present — we experience her almost entirely through other people’s memories. Was it a challenge to make audiences care about someone who’s essentially an absence?

Getting Natasha O’Keeffe to play her did a lot of that work. She had to sell everything without saying anything. The three leads are insane — they’re jumping out of lighthouses, blowing up boats — and then we go to Greta and she’s very still. All that trauma is in her veins. I tried to drip-feed information so the audience would stay curious, and by the end maybe understand why she did what she did.

That backstory — Greta accidentally burning down a church with children inside — is genuinely horrifying. How did you decide a comedy-mystery could handle that level of darkness?

You just have to try it. On the page, a lot is about what you leave out and what you suggest. Some sentences you simply can’t write because the tone won’t take them. With the heavy stuff, it was about saying as little as possible — giving the audience just enough information to fill in the gaps. And then we took some jokes out that were too close to that material, because they were burying the seriousness of the story. A lot got resolved in the edit. Using those visual flashes helped — you’re seeing something but not necessarily hearing it in dialogue. It was a real puzzle.

And how do you calibrate the tonal shift from comedy to darkness without giving the audience whiplash?

I think a lot of it comes down to the performances. These three actors — Roisin, Sinéad and Caoilfhionn — have this incredible ensemble chemistry. To walk that line as an actor and go from the really stupid stuff to the more emotional stuff is so hard. They sell everything. They sell the stupid bits and they sell the really sad bits. That’s what makes the tone work.

The underground relocation scheme — basically a secret witness protection program — is a wild plot element. Up until the last 10 minutes I thought Booker and Feeney were evil. Where did the idea for the scheme come from, and what led you to give them redemption?

I had this idea of not wanting anybody to be really bad or anybody to be really good. I wanted you to think Booker [Bronagh Gallagher] is psychotic at the beginning — she seems like a hitwoman. But then you realize she’s actually part of this organization that’s trying to help women, just in a psychotic way, in mad ways. She doesn’t have a huge problem killing people if she needs to, particularly if she has to kill a man. But she really believed in what that organization set out to do, which was help women start a new life. That got so corrupted and eroded over time. I really liked that she believed in something — and that sometimes believing in something very hard can be very dangerous.

Saoirse-Monica Jackson who plays Erin in “Derry Girls” turns up as a bubblegum-pink assassin’s sidekick whose costumes get more elaborate with every scene. How did that casting happen?

Booker needed a sidekick — someone she would want to throw out a car window while it was still moving. I kept picturing this quirky blonde, like Gwen Stefani actually, and then I thought: Saoirse-Monica. Just the worst possible person to put next to Booker. She agreed immediately. I don’t think she’d even read it. And then the costume designer Kathy Prior just kept throwing more on, and it kept getting funnier.

“Derry Girls” you wrote entirely alone. This time you had a writers’ room. What changed?

I don’t think I would ever want to do something on my own again. “Derry Girls” was so personal it would have been complicated to explain to other writers. But having smart people you can go to for help — it’s just better. It’s eight hours of television. You’re trying to turn the story constantly. My husband is one of the writers and he’s very good at horror, which isn’t my strength. Some writers brought real emotional intelligence to the younger characters. And then Brona — there’s no situation too silly for Brona. She did all the stuff where they’re locked in the confessional. You need a specialist for all of it.

The show moved from Channel 4 to Netflix around the time of the writers’ strike. What was that transition like?

Netflix have been amazing — they want to support the writer’s vision and help it reach as large an audience as possible. But honestly it felt the same, because my team hasn’t changed in 16 years. Same director, same producer, same production company, filming in Belfast. We just got the gang back together and made another show. Only now it goes out all over the world at once, which is terrifying. The idea that someone on the other side of the world who has never heard of Belfast might watch this — I still can’t quite believe it.

In the end Greta gets to leave with her daughter and husband under new identities. Will we be seeing her again?

Possibly. There’s something connected to what’s in the bag at the end, and she might help with that. I also love the idea of throwing the three leads into a new, even crazier scenario—maybe taking them out of Ireland and bringing them back.

If there’s a season two, do the women get any better at solving mysteries?

I don’t think they’ll have learned anything. They might have a false sense of confidence about themselves, which could be even more dangerous. Or cause more problems. Which would also be funny. I think it’s probably funnier if they’re still chaotic and not very good.

This interview has been edited and condensed.