A good TV show is so important. Having something to binge after a long day can be restorative, and there are so many shows that have comforted not only me but many others; The Office, and Arrested Development, to name a few.
Although I love these shows, sometimes the hidden or even obvious misogyny gets to me. Like, why must the lovable female characters always fit our standards of physical beauty to a T? And, more deeply; why can’t the female characters be messy, and morally ambiguous — why do we write female characters as archetypes; sweet and charming or sexy and cold or straight up bitchy? There’s little space for female characters to come to life and be more than a pretty face.
In Netflix’s 2026 thriller series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, women who are messy, brilliant, struggling, and intelligent, set out to solve a mystery. On the surface level, this is a thriller, or more a mystery in which four 40-year-old women in present day Ireland investigate the death — or maybe disappearance of their high school friend. As these four friends argue their way around the world chasing bits and pieces of information about their old friend they are forced to relive a shared trauma they all experienced back in high school.
This trauma which is slowly revealed throughout the series reveals these women’s past wrongdoings and brings them to life by making them flawed. At the same time, these women — who are bold and unapologetically themselves — show a vulnerable side of aging, loneliness, motherhood and the inexplicable complicated feelings that come with being a woman in a society that belittles us, rates us and objectifies us.
The show truly shook me to my core. For the first time I thought the girls on the screen might actually look like me and my friends. Not filtered at all, not stereotypically perfect, not always sweet but a mix of every feeling and aspect of girlhood and womanhood.
“Not filtered at all, not stereotypically perfect, not always sweet but a mix of every feeling and aspect of girlhood and womanhood.”
The cherry on top of this moving, feminist masterpiece, is that it’s a comedy and a bit of a romance. One of the few male characters is a romantic interest and treated almost like a female character would be in a traditional American film; he is hot, and totally obsessed with one of the older women. It is almost comical how Lisa McGee, the creator of this series, reverses gender roles.
The comedy of the show is deadpan and witty like that of the show Derry Girls, Lisa McGee’s magnum opus. So, if you are looking for a thriller this fall, look to Ireland for true female empowerment and one of the best representations I’ve seen of modern womanhood.