Credit: Channel 4
Life
Derry Girls: everything you need to know about season 2 of the hit family comedy
By Sarah Shaffi
7 years ago
Teen drama, set to a Nineties’ soundtrack, is on the cards.
Cast aside your straighteners and embrace scrunch-dried hair in preparation for the second series of Derry Girls.
The show first hit our screens in 2018, charming us with its combination of poignant drama and laugh-out-loud comedy in just six episodes, and making us nostalgic for the Nineties.
The first season introduced Erin Quinn (Saoirse Monica Jackson), her cousin Orla McCool (Louisa Harland) and friends Clare Devlin (Nicola Coughlan), Michelle Mallon (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell). Joining them was Michelle’s tag along English cousin, aka The Wee English Fella, James Maguire (Dylan Llewellyn).
We followed the group as they navigated crushes, family and friendship against the backdrop of the Troubles in Derry, Northern Ireland, and it looks like we’re in for more of the same in the second season.
Here’s everything we know so far…
When will the second season hit our TV screens?
Filming on the second season of Derry Girls has finished, and Channel 4 has confirmed that it will begin airing episodes in March 2019, so there’s not long to wait.
How many episodes will there be?
Like the first season, season two will have six 30-minute episodes.
Which cast members will be returning for the show’s second season?
All our favourites – Erin, Orla, Clare, Michelle and James – will be back.
Who is joining the cast?
Father Ted actor Ardal O’Hanlon will be joining the Derry Girls’ family, although sadly not as a priest. He’ll play Eamonn, described as the “awkward, middle-aged mummy’s boy of the Quinn/McCool extended family”.
Where did we leave the characters last time?
The final episode of season one delivered some big moments.
The girls were accidentally put in charge of their school magazine, The Habit, and published an anonymous confession from a pupil about her sexuality.
The letter-writer turned out to be Clare, who came out to her friends and family. In a shock move, however, her best friend Erin didn’t take the news well, telling her to “go back in” the closet.
But the friends reunited at the school talent contest where they, along with James and Michelle, leapt up on stage to support Orla as she performed a step aerobics routine to Madonna’s Like a Prayer.
The emotional punches didn’t stop there – scenes of the group dancing was interspersed with Erin and Orla’s family switching on the TV to learn that a fatal IRA bombing had destroyed the Quinn household.
Is there a trailer for season 2 of Derry Girls?
Season two looks set to address the Troubles in its own unique way – an early scene in the trailer show the group wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “friends across the barricade”, while Mary Quinn (Tara Lynne O’Neill), Erin’s mum, instructs them that there is to be “no funny business with these Protestant lads, I don’t want anybody landing back here pregnant”.
There are also some great Nineties references in the form of the Rowing Boat Dance, shell suits and mention of what would become everyone’s favourite boyband over the resulting years – Take That.
And it’s all accompanied to a soundtrack of Urban Cookie Collective’s dance hit The Key, The Secret and The Cranberries’ Dreams.
What will season two be about?
When Derry Girls was renewed, show creator Lisa McGee told the Radio Times that she was “toying with maybe doing the ceasefire and how everyone reacts to that because I remember it actually unsettled people”.
McGee also said she would like one of her characters to get a boyfriend, or Clare to a girlfriend.
But whatever else changes, the central gang are still the same teenagers we met in season one. Jackson told the Radio Times that “the girls are definitely in the same situation, still a disaster, still a bunch of selfish teenagers, still getting themselves into trouble and thinking they’re right at all times”.
Images: Channel 4
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