John Powers

Great for moving you along efficiently, but all pretty much the same.

And in truth, you can't see much of life from there.

You're better off on the streets, back roads, and alleyways.

Someone who grasps this is Lisa McGee, the Northern Irish screenwriter who had an international hit with Dairy Girls, a beloved teen comedy series set during the violent troubles of the late 90s.

This time out, McGee has turned her unruly sensibility to a crime show.

The result, Netflix's How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, is a madcap riff on the murder mystery.

Vastly entertaining and flagrantly Irish, the show serves up so many different tones that it's like watching one of those performers who can juggle a chainsaw, a puppy, and a bowl of jello while playing a banjo with their teeth.

The story centers on three late-thirties Belfast women who've been friends since going to Catholic school together.

There's Saoirse, played by Roisin Gallagher, a tireless fantasist who created a hit cop show that even she thinks is stupid.

There's Robin, that's Sinead Keenan, a bossy, foul-mouthed bourgeois mother of three.

Imagine an Irish Weiss Witherspoon.

And there's Dara, played by Keelan Dunn, a lovelorn lesbian who might seem like a drip.

She's stuck caring for her mom.

Except that Dunn gives her the quiet drollery of a Buster Keaton or Stan Laurel.

The three hear about the death of their estranged school friend Greta, with whom they have long shared a dark, potentially ruinous secret.

And so they head down to scenic County Donegal to pay their respects.

But they quickly realize there's something suspicious about Greta's death.

At search's urging—she writes crime shows, after all—they begin to dig.

Naturally, trouble follows.

Soon they're dealing with everyone from Booker, she's an enigmatically murderous outlaw, to Liam, a member of the Irish Garda, or police, who they fear will learn their secret.