Lisa McGee Found it Hard to Say Goodbye to Her ‘Derry Girls’

LONDON — In 1990s Northern Ireland, Lisa McGee and her friends decided to skip school to go to a concert. They were caught when one of the group posed for a photograph at the event, which then ended up on the front page of a local newspaper and was seen by her parents.

“I’ll never forget that story because of how delighted my friend was in that photograph compared to the trouble she got in. It was just the perfect contrast,” McGee, 42, recalled in a recent video interview. She added: “I remember her saying it was worth it. I think she got grounded for life.”

That was just one of many childhood experiences McGee drew on for her TV comedy, “Derry Girls,” which follows a group of chaotic and accident-prone friends and their families. The show, while joyous, is set during the Troubles — the violent, decades-long sectarian conflict that defined the region until the late ’90s.

Like her characters, McGee attended a Roman Catholic school in Derry, and, like the show’s central figure, Erin, she grew up wanting to be a writer. The third and final season of “Derry Girls” arrives Friday on Netflix after airing in Britain this year, and McGee admitted that she had been struggling to let go.

“I was connected to those characters in a way that I think is probably not entirely healthy,” she said. She kept notebooks filled with details for each of them, she added, and even now, lines for the characters still come to her. “It was really hard to stop talking to them,” she said.

In the recent interview, McGee discussed growing up in Derry, which is also known as Londonderry; the joys of being ridiculous; and bringing the show to a close. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

When did you realize your childhood could be fodder for a show?

When I moved to London, there were a few of my Northern Irish friends that moved over at the same time. And I remember being out in the pub and talking about stuff that happened to us and there was just horror on English people’s faces. We normalize this stuff that English people were like, “That’s not normal, lads, that’s weird.” I realized there’s something really funny about this, that this little pocket, this little place has normalized all this crazy stuff.

I’d always felt that my group of friends at school were funny, and I’d always wanted to write something about a group of female teenagers who were the leads and were being the ridiculous people, not just the “friend” or “sister.”

You’ve said in the past that, growing up, you didn’t want to write about the Troubles. What changed for you?

Well, the truth is, I wasn’t going to. I was going to set the show in the modern day and it was actually my executive producer, Liz Lewin, who had been in pubs with me and my friends, listening to all these stories and said, “You’re really missing a trick, I really think you should try and do a period piece.” I just thought it was a headache, it’s too complicated, people wouldn’t understand. But I’m so glad she convinced me because the minute I started writing it, it gave me the chance to explain some things, and talk about some things that maybe people in the rest of the U.K. didn’t know about.

But yeah, I just found the Troubles so boring. It was all that was on the news and I wanted to be a writer because I liked the escape, the fantasy of it all. So I still can’t believe this is the thing that has been the most successful thing for me.

The stars and heart of the show are the women and girls. How influential were the women you grew up around, what were they like?

When I went to university, I realized Derry was different from all other places. The women, traditionally, were the breadwinners because it was a factory town and, apart from shirt factories, there wasn’t any other employment really, so a lot of the men were unemployed. So we grew up in this sort of weird society where the dads were looking after the kids and the mums were going to work.

I also went to an all-girls convent school, so the cleverest person was a girl, the sports hero was a girl, the class clown was a girl. Growing up, everyone who was powerful or interesting or funny was female. I never questioned that we should be those things when I grew up, because women were very rock ’n’ roll where I came from, very forthright and very funny and ballsy and tough. That’s what I knew, and it only started to sort of fall apart when I grew up a bit.

On “Derry Girls,” the girls aren’t aged up or put in particularly adult situations. They are ridiculous and embarrassing in ways that feel very true to teenagers. Was that a conscious choice?

Part of it was just that was what was truthful — I was that ridiculous person. It was definitely a conscious decision for them not to be sexualized. I feel that’s the story that’s told over and over again about teenage girls. I always felt like, yes, that’s part of it, but our panic about not getting good grades was up there along with what boys we wanted to get with. Our ambition was one of the biggest things about my group of friends, that panic about failing or not getting into university, not getting a good job, all that sort of stuff. There was also the importance of your relationship with your other friends, that gang, that group, how important their opinions were.

As young people, how present were the dangers of the Troubles for you and your friends?

Now, looking back, you really lose your breath thinking about how dangerous things were, but we weren’t really scared. Not really. But we should have been. There were armed soldiers on our streets, outside our houses and lots of other gunmen in balaclavas floating about on the other side of things. It’s what you know; we didn’t overthink it. It actually, weirdly, started to really affect me and my friends after the Good Friday Agreement. When peace times started, we realized that what happened wasn’t OK, and there was a hope that things wouldn’t go back to the way they were.

The realities of the violence were so dark, yet “Derry Girls” maintained a lightness. How did you think about the show’s tone?

I always just thought about it through their eyes, how they would see it. For most teenagers, their views are very selfish, it’s like, “How can I make this about me?” and for the adults, it’s just a bit of an inconvenience most of the time, as it would have been.

There’s a line in an episode where Michelle says there’s something sexy about the fact they hate us so much. Everything has its spin. So Michelle’s always thinking about sex, and Erin, quite a pompous character, loves the idea of it and writes about being a child of conflict and all of that.

What I decided was that most of the story has to be about whatever the gang are trying to do that week, with the Troubles normally getting in the way of it.

The show ends on an episode set around the time of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, and the declaration of peace. Why did you choose that as the show’s end point?

I feel like that was the day Northern Ireland grew up, that vote and that phenomenal, phenomenal thing. That was the day we put all the pain and suffering behind us for the greater good. And I wanted to run that parallel to the kids’ growing up. It’s the beginning of their adulthood, just as Northern Ireland is walking into this new phase of its life. It always felt like that’s where I should naturally end the show, this hope and the positivity of the agreement and them going out into the big, bad world.