John Powers

Now, I worry this description may make the show sound like a cozily routine murder mystery.

It's anything but.

As the show leaps between past and present, our heroines rocket from one loony scene to the next.

They see ghosts.

They have car crashes.

Yes, more than one.

They find themselves in funerals, five-star Portuguese resorts, abandoned lighthouses, yachts, golf carts, jails, religious processions, country and western nights at a pub where women dress as Dolly Parton.

Not to mention a St.

Patrick's Day parade, bursting with the screwball exuberance of a Preston Sturgis movie.

Here, fleeing the menacing Booker, they hide in a line of people queuing up to see the Irish equivalent of The Tonight Show.

Saoirse doesn't want to go in, but Robin explains why they have to, then bluffs the woman who's taking the tickets.

She can't kill us on live TV.

The opening episodes of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast are so gleefully freewheeling that it's a tad disappointing when later on it serves up some obligatory crime show stuff.

You know, explaining the murder, drawing a moral, etc.

The show is at its best when it's most anarchic.

Luckily, McGee is less interested in the creaky mechanisms of mystery plotting than in conjuring up a giddily surreal world, one that weds some of David Lynch's sense of teenage darkness to an anticomic style akin to the Marx Brothers.

The show is teeming with garrulous Irish folk whose crazy dialogue just sings.

none more so than Robin, niftily played by Keenan, a buzzing beehive of a woman who fires off obscene and blasphemous lines like a rapper.

The glue that holds all the lunacy together is the decades-old friendship of its heroines.

Here are women who know how to annoy, wound, and manipulate each other.