MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In a Hollywood Reporter review of the Irish sitcom Derry Girls, currently available on Netflix, Robyn Bahr wrote, “2018 has officially been the Year of the Female Wanker. From Motherland’s obnoxiously self-interested Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) to Blockers’ prudish momicopter (Leslie Mann) to Superstore’s smugly righteous Amy (America Ferrera), we’re finally starting to see gender equality for neurotic prigs and their provocateur friends. For far too long, British men have held the baton for hubristic TV killjoys you gleefully root to fail: It’s high time we delight in stomping our boots on selfish and squirming girl jerks, too. Sure, these Derry girls are adorable, but forget ‘likability’ — their episodic humiliations are our comedy gold.” What makes the show so compelling is not that its four female leads are self-absorbed, immature, and rebellious. Such characters are hardly in short supply. Nor is it accurate that we root for them to fail. They are typical teenage girls facing classic obstacles, including dour school principal Sister Michael, strict parents who believe the priests are instruments of God, and social limitations dictated by their working-class status. What makes the show compelling is seeing the Troubles from the perspective of girls who have little respect for authority and who see all men – whether the young, attractive priest who invites them to call him “Peter” or the soldiers who search their school bus with military rifles – as prospective sexual partners. The juxtaposition of their naivete and reckless behavior with the gravity of life in the North in the 1990s both intensifies and normalizes the violence, as in the pilot episode, in which the protagonist’s family responds to the bombing of a local bridge by insisting matter-of-factly, “Sure, their bus can go the long way round.”