![]() ![]() But the fun is soon interrupted by news of a death. In one episode, a slow-motion shot of the gang coming down the Quinn family stairway in Halloween costumes is reminiscent of so many montages of teens preening and primping before a big dance or party. The show is well versed in the beats of an archetypal, young-people-and-their-hijinks narrative, and the visuals are often doused in warm, homey tones. Even as hilarity ensues, the episode is imbued with an existential aura this may be the last time these friends ever get up to no good while worrying about grades. They’re the GCSEs, which will determine where or if the characters will go to college. We’ve felt test-related woes with the characters before-particularly in my favorite Derry Girls episode, which involves a dog peeing on a statue of the Virgin Mary-but these aren’t just any test results. But what takes center stage is not the Troubles inching toward their end, but rather Erin and her friends stressing about exam results. ![]() In the first episode of its final season, mentions of peace talks flicker across Erin’s family’s TV screen. Read: The teen dramas that reject modernity By evading endings and repeating tropes, all of these shows peddle the same strange lie-that adolescence can last forever. Even the most recent season of Sex Education has begun to make me wonder when Otis, Maeve, and Eric will graduate, both from school and from our screens. How many times could Chuck and Blair come together and fall apart? Though the cast changed every two seasons, Skins still circled teenage anomie, unexpected pregnancy, and excessive drug use like a myopic moth to a flame. The results were repetitive and insular stories. ![]() But these shows kept the camera going even as the characters aged out of adolescence. The original Gossip Girl, Riverdale, and Skins were technically coming-of-age stories as well. As the literary scholar Frank Kermode wrote in his book The Sense of an Ending, conclusions are important to us because they’re where we process the real, heartrending stakes of time moving forward. ![]() It also shows us that intentional endings matter. Derry Girls, rooted in a bildungsroman structure, naturally finishes when its characters transition into adulthood. Some will be angling for university others will look for jobs. Soon, they’ll be out of their telltale green-plaid uniforms, and out of one another’s everyday life. But around them swirls a historic conflict, their mundane experiences peppered with announcements from the living-room television about bombings, prisoners, and, eventually, tentative peace talks and cease-fires.īy the show’s last episodes, the friends are 18 and about to leave school. Theirs are universal concerns of growing up they hunger for love, friendship, attention, freedom. Their main challenges are adolescent ones through and through. When we meet Erin and her gang, they are 16 and starting a new school year. If a writer wants to move on, they either identify a worthy successor or close the book.īut more important, Derry Girls is a coming-of-age story, which means it must end. shows rely on a single writer for all of their episodes (in this case, the indomitable Lisa McGee). There are logistical reasons for the finale: Many of the actors who play teenagers on the show are verging on or in their 30s the show portrays the finite time period when the Troubles led to the Good Friday Agreement and unlike their American counterparts, many U.K. Īfter three uproarious seasons, Derry Girls, a television show about four teenage girls and one teenage boy living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, has ended. This story contains some spoilers for all three seasons of Derry Girls. ![]()
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