Derry Girls is a dead-on parody of shows like The Wonder Years that have nostalgia for the past

The Week

The British Channel 4 sitcom, which recently returned for Season 2 on Netflix, "isn't just unsentimental, it's actively anti-nostalgic," says Aaron Bady. "It might be loosely adapted from (creator Lisa) McGee's own teenage upbringing in Northern Ireland, in the famously war-torn 1990's, but McGee uses the period-appropriate music and clothes to remind us how ugly the nineties could be — how garish, how loud, and how un-self-consciously silly — while the cramped and excessively intimate living arrangements make one long for escape. This is not to deny that the show knows what to do with a well-placed Cranberries or Enya track (and if you can come away from this show not genuflecting to Dolores O'Riordan and Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáinv, I don't know what to do with you). But its moments of raw, vulnerable feeling are few and far between, made all the more poignant by the otherwise uninterrupted slapstick farce of teenagers in a ridiculous age." ALSO: Derry Girls resists the easy traps that so often hinder teen shows.