“Well, I’m not going to be an individual on my own!”
With Season 3 of Bridgerton getting closer and closer to premiering, Polin fans are naturally getting all hyped up for their favorite pairing to finally have their shot at the marriage mart. After all, Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) has been a fan favorite character ever since the show first dropped in 2020, and viewers have been dying to see her get her happy ending. Sure, there are those who would rather watch a romance blossom between the woman behind Lady Whistledown (voiced by Julie Andrews) and her best friend Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie), but it has never been a secret that her true love is none other than Miss Bridgerton’s brother Colin (Luke Newton). It’s right there in the Julia Quinn series of books, folks! Still, no matter if your team Eloise or team Colin, if you’re big on Penelope, you’re no doubt excited for more of Nicola Coughlan’s amazing performance. So how about taking a look at some of Coughlan’s other projects? If you’re unsure where to start, there’s no better choice than a little comedy show by the name of Derry Girls.
With only three seasons, the longest of which has merely seven episodes, Derry Girls is one of those beautiful gems hiding in the Netflix catalog. A Channel 4 original, the show hit the streamer back in 2018, two years before the romance between Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page) became the gossip of the ton. It made some ripples among big TV aficionados, but it remains somewhat overlooked when it comes to wider audiences. It’s a pity: not only is Derry Girls one of the funniest shows out there — it’s definitely among the cream of the crop of the 2010s — it also offers viewers a unique look at both a complicated moment in history and a young performer’s set of skills.
What Is ‘Derry Girls’ About?
Created by Lisa McGee and based on the showrunner’s own experiences growing up in Northern Ireland, Derry Girls follows a group of teenage friends as they come of age in the town of Derry during the last years of the Troubles. The conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland from the ’60s to the late ’90s opposed those that coveted the reunification of Ireland to factions loyal to the United Kingdom. With a trail of dead well into the thousands, the Troubles came to an end in 1998, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) agreed to a ceasefire and peace talks began.
The Northern Irish armed conflict serves as a backdrop for Derry Girls, which follows the lives of Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Orla McCool (Louisa Harland), Michelle Mallon (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), James Maguire (Dylan Llewellyn) and, of course, Clare Devlin (Nicola Coughlan). In between bomb threats, political speeches and Take That concerts, the titular Derry girls learn to navigate the world around them, wreaking havoc on the lives of their parents and of the students and faculty of Our Lady Immaculate.
Now, when we say wreaking havoc, we kind of mean it. In some ways, Derry Girls works as a sort of baby’s first It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as its set of main characters are undoubtedly horrible, horrible people. With the possible exception of Orla, who is just “subnormal”, to put it in Sister Michael’s (Siobhán McSweeney) words, the girls and James — a Derry girl at heart, despite being relentlessly bullied for having been born in England — are selfish, dumb, and ready to destroy everything, from “wee” statues of Jesus to full-blown parties. Derry Girls is one of those sitcoms that relies on its protagonists being utterly the worst, and it excels at that. In one episode, cousins Erin and Orla welcome a Chernobyl survivor, Katya (Diona Doherty), in their home, only for Erin to later accuse her of being a prostitute out of jealousy for James. In another, the very first one in the series, the girls are sent to detention only to be found peeing in a classroom and stealing food from the cold hands of a dead nun. In yet another one, they ruin a funeral by clogging a toilet with marijuana-laced scones.
But, despite their awfulness, it’s hard to fault the Derry girls for their wrongdoings. After all, the world in which they live is also extremely unfair towards them, and, in many cases, the Troubles are the least of their concerns. The party that the girls ruin? It was organized by Jenny Joyce (Leah O’Rourke), an insufferable teacher’s pet that takes every opportunity she gets to humiliate Erin and her friends. The funeral with the scones? It was Erin and Orla’s awful great-aunt’s, a despicable woman who accused a group of kids of being feral for kicking her 50-year-old son out of a line dance. And, come on, are the girls really to blame if Sister Declan (Barbara Adair) died in the middle of detention? She was just so old! Add to that, little injustices such as being forbidden from attending a concert because there’s a polar bear on the loose in Belfast, and you can’t help but understand what made the girls into who they are.
Nicola Coughlan’s Clare Devlin Is a Key Member of the Derry Girls
Particularly awful among the Derry girls are the self-aggrandizing and self-absorbed Erin and the constantly horny Michelle. But if we’re ranking the girls, then Nicola Coughlan’s Clare comes in a close third. A pathologically anxious goody-two-shoes without a single ounce of moral fiber, she’s not above selling out her friends if it means keeping her permanent record intact. That is clear from the get-go: in the first episode of the series, the girls get in trouble for trying to bully a group of younger students out of their seats on the school bus. Despite making a point of saying that they should stick together, Clare immediately breaks once inside Sister Michael’s office and starts screaming that it was all Michelle’s idea. “I think it’s safe to say,” Sister Michael remarks, “that we all just lost a bit of respect for you there, Clare.”
It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Clare Devlin, particularly after the Season 1 finale of Derry Girls. In a particularly touching episode, Erin manages to take control of the school newspaper. However, she ends up losing her entire staff. At a loss about what to print, she decides to challenge Sister Michael’s orders and run an anonymous story submitted by a gay student to a contest organized by Jenny Joyce. The school is abuzz with discussions about who the “wee lesbian” might be, and that’s when Clare, who had been against running the story from the start, comes out to her friends. Erin is initially taken aback and cold towards her friend, who she thinks is coming onto her, but the gang eventually gets back together when they have to protect Orla at the school’s talent show. For the rest of the series, the Derry girls are frequently seen wearing rainbow pins on their uniforms in support of their “wee lesbian” friend.
‘Derry Girls’ Gives Us a Completely Un-‘Bridgerton’-Like Version of Coughlan
In many ways, Derry Girls offers us a version of Coughlan that is the complete opposite from what we see in Bridgerton. Unlike Penelope Featherington, who is calm and collected even in her moments of despair, Clare Devlin is a non-stop ball of worries, grimacing and screaming at every opportunity. In situations in which Penelope would blink back tears and turn to her writing as a weapon, Clare simply goes completely ballistic, her anxiety palpable.
It’s tough to say that Derry Girls allows Coughlan to explore her comedic set of skills as opposed to Bridgerton. While the latter does indeed demand a more dramatic kind of performance from its cast, it is still a pretty light show, with Coughlan having room to stretch a few of her laugh-inducing muscles from time to time. However, it is nothing compared to what she is able to do on Derry Girls. Side by side, Bridgerton and Derry Girls shows Coughlan’s enviable range, from romantic heroine to gifted comedian.
Sure, Derry Girls will probably not give you the dose of sexiness that you are probably craving in between seasons of Bridgerton. However, if you’re enjoying Nicola Coughlan as Penelope, why not face the wait headfirst by watching something else that the actress has to offer? Coughlan is a relatively new performer, with little to her name apart from her role in the two series mentioned in this article: a small role in Barbie, a handful of episodes of Hulu’s Harlots… As a main character, Bridgerton and Derry Girls are her only real claims to fame. One of these projects is already well-known. The other sure deserves its day in the sun.
Derry Girls is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
