Catching up on Derry Girls (Netflix) Season 3, and Ghosts (CBS) Season 2

Derry Girls (Netflix)- Books and media taking place in the pseudo-war zone of Ireland are an odd phenomenon to reflect on today. With this greater awareness for “people of color” and images of genocides in Haiti, Cambodia, and Ethiopia sprawled on the covers of National Geographic, it’s hard to picture Ireland---one of the world’s biggest tourist hubs—as some sort of war zone: Between civilized people of the same pale color.

My sister briefly taught abroad in Ireland and it was exciting to see this normally apolitical get all passionate about the conflict there. But I must confess—five years later, I don’t remember who did what to whom. Still, the interesting thing is that Ireland is much closer than actual war zones—Ethiopia, Haiti, Nigeria, Indonesia—to the creative centers of power so if creative figures like Kenneth Branagh, Neil Jordan, and Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee have stories to tell about it, there’s a much higher chance that that story will be told.

Derry Girls, now entering its third season, tells the story of five childhood friends bound together by familial bonds (among the five are two sets of cousins and they all grew up in the same side of the neighborhoods) who are getting into enough trouble in their Catholic girls’ school to make Lucy Ricardo look tame by comparison. One of the running jokes is that one of the five “Derry Girls” is an ordinary straight guy, James, who tags along with them to the girls’ school because, well, who knows. It's not important. The show uses a lot of 

It’s not exclusively about war zones and class conflict but class (the protagonist Erin’s parents and grandfather all live under the same roof) and religious conflict (the fear that James might be picked on if he went to a protestant school) insert themselves in organic ways to create a very strong sense of place which is this show’s biggest appeal.

 

Ghosts (CBS)-Continuing to work my way up the list of best shows of the year, the show is about a mansion run by a couple of yuppies that is inhabited by ghosts of eight different time periods—a Viking, a Native American pre-Columbus, a Revolutionary War soldier, a widow from the guilded age, a jazz age singer, a hippie, a dweeby travel agent from the 80s, and a Wall Street boy-with lots of unresolved issues and a great sense of camaraderie. Due to a near death experience, the wife (Rose McIver) can interact with ghosts (who use most of their interactions with her, using her as a TV remote control among other things) but her husband can’t, which creates a pretty ripe dynamic for comedy. The first season was pretty exposition heavy with each character getting a day in the limelight so the writers can milk entire episodes on exposition.

In the second season, Ghosts seems to find their groove even more as the characters change enough to keep things interesting but not hard enough to disrupt the status quo. After all, these characters have been in existence for centuries in some cases. The mood whiplash for them in changing overnight is a real thing, so it's been wise to take the changes slow.

It's also interesting to note how even though Utkarsh Ambudkar is the epitome of coolness (he raps with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs), he successfully pulls off a dork here (his hobbies aren't too far off from Phil Dumphy on Modern Family