Today's Episode
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Today's Episode
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (PILOT)
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The pilot of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, a new Netflix comedy-thriller, follows a group of friends in their late 30s as they take a road trip into rural Ireland to the (fictional) town of Knockdara to pay their respects at their former friend’s wake. While delayed by car trouble, small-town logistics, goats, and hangovers, the anxious trio eventually finds themselves face-to-face with what might be the creepiest family in Ireland. In this podcast, we break down our favorite parts, the reveals, the genre-meshing and comparisons to Search Party, Yellowjackets, Pretty Little Liars, and The ’Burbs.
Tune in for our thoughts and rating. Welcome to Today’s Episode.
Welcome to today's episode, the podcast where we discuss the most recent installment of a different series every show. It is Tuesday, February 17th. The creator of Dairy Girls, which I never saw, Lisa McGee, is at it again with a news show, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. This is about three friends who investigate the mysterious death of a former schoolmate, which immediately made me hopeful that this was going to be like a spiritual successor to Search Party, which was about some friends who get overly entangled into the mystery of their former friend's disappearance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that also I know is on Netflix. It used to be on HBO Max. So they're both on Netflix right now.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Well, I would recommend them both to start out with. If you're looking for an absurdist, surrealist comedy that mixes genres and uh gives no apologies for it, because this is a hat trick production, which also likes to mix genres. They they also produce Whose Line. They produced the Dairy Girls as well. They they produced uh Dairy Girls, they produced Episodes, which is a meta-critique with Matt LeBlanc, Worst Week, which was that British uh sitcom from many years ago, and then Flack. So yeah, they they do all types of comedy. And uh and so, like, yeah, Lisa McGee, had you ever seen Dairy Girls?
SPEAKER_00No, I hadn't, but I know that was a global phenomenon and it ran for like three seasons, I think.
SPEAKER_01Right. She feels like the type of creator who like knows what she wants to do, she gets a greenlit, and then she writes most, if not all, the episodes.
SPEAKER_00Wow, you actually got it kind of right on the head because uh when she was producing the final season or when she was working on the final season, she decided that she was going to write the pilot for this.
SPEAKER_01It makes sense because the Dairy Girls uh whole show was like about teens played by actresses in their 20s. This is like 20 years future-wise. She's it's a little bit of an older group. They're 38. Uh, I and so they're like nervously getting they don't want to age, but at the same time, you can tell all those like jokes are coming from that.
SPEAKER_00Her main reason was that she needed to write something that wasn't Dairy Girls, that the characters of Dairy Girls were not talking to her inside her head. So she decided that she would write the first episode. And I think by the time that the series Dairy Girls was done, she had written three episodes and then the writer's room, which she really enjoyed. I think it was like the first time or one of the first times she had it. She uh she worked mixing with other people.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah. Um, so the wake, I think she is credited as writing completely herself, however. She wrote the first three episodes and the last two. Yes, 40 some minutes uh long. And the intro is more less like uh search party and more like pretty little liars or yellow jackets or bad sisters. Bad sisters completely, yeah. Yeah, well, it kind of it's like pretty little liars where they introduce you to a mystery. You see a flashback where there's like these these girls who have started a fire, and one of them is now the one who's going to end up dead in this in this series. So they're obviously going to be like looking to figure out what happened to her and also yeah, we were liars too. There's just a the it's something about 2005. If you look at the Burbs, they also had this mystery going back about the missing Allison and that show. But in Pretty Little Liars, uh, it was also Allison.
SPEAKER_00I remember in 2000, uh, I connected it to a 2004 film without a paddle, which revolves around three uh people uniting as well. Also with Matthew Lillard from our most recent show. And Antoni Starr. He plays the friend that dies. And I know that like they uh all got together and I think we're celebrating him. So yeah, there's a lot of things you can pull from.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. My point, I guess, is that the intro is disappointing to me because I'm a little scared that it was going to drift into oh, just the regular we have a secret, we don't want to tell anybody, and they're just gonna play by those tropes. Then we're introduced to our three main leads. There's Dara or Dara. She's got this nervous inner energy, she's unhinged.
SPEAKER_00She reminded me so much of Kristen Wig in her intro because she was able to talk so fast. She got those lines. She's a fascinated ADHD type personality.
SPEAKER_01She likes to wear a beanie, and I think she's the most remorseful of the three that her friend is dead. The other two seemed more concerned with either themselves or about covering up whatever happened. Robin seems insane. Robin is a control freak. She is a mom of three, and uh, she's very vain because she's uh constantly talking about getting a spa treatment or her makeup done before heading out to see her friend's wage.
SPEAKER_00She had that whole like uh dream sequence where she's banging her head against the steering wheel and like showing her kids that she has blood across her face.
SPEAKER_01I think plenty of moms can probably uh connect with her uh when the kids are just yelling in the backseat. Shurza, I think though, is the most Lisa McGee character because she is a script writer, just like Lisa McGee, and she's writing for the stupid cop procedural where she's having to deal with actors who are coming out and with their own statements, like we don't no longer want to work on a murder show, or we want to work on the murder show, but we no longer want it to be about murder.
SPEAKER_00They think it's groundbreaking to do that. Yes. You know, it it always draws me back to Aaron Sorkin when he talks about how he loves actors, but he hates when they chime in with any type of story ideas. Whenever I hear that though, I just I sign on the on the on the actor's side for that.
SPEAKER_01Like a Christopher Nolan calls most of the actors he works with geniuses and says, like, they wouldn't be in their positions unless they have like really important critiques that they want to make to scripts and stuff. So it's like, yeah, you have the give and take. And Aaron Sorkin has certainly like burned a few bridges that way. Anyway, so Lisa McGee, she's getting married soon. She's probably the most successful of the three of them, but all three are high-strung and frazzled individuals, 38 years old, and they received this email from Gay Heriton. And who's Gay Herriton? Um, we're not supposed to know. She is the sister-in-law of Greta O'Neal. And Greta O'Neill is the fourth friend who they haven't spoken to in 20 years. And unfortunately, Gay is inviting them to Greta's wake because Sertia is the first one to figure out about it, though, right?
SPEAKER_00Like we are the first to see her in the exact opposite.
SPEAKER_01So Dara finds out first. She's she's at that cafe talking about how, like, everything in her life, because she's taking care of her mom and stuff. Then it goes to Robin, who is in the car with her kids. She finds out, and then Robin tries to connect with Shurza. Shurza is in that meeting with uh with her client or with the actor. And then once she gets out of there, that's when she finds out that her friend is dead. They go on a road trip comedy together. Shurza has to fly in from Belfast, and they all kind of make the same joke when they see each other. We're dying now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It takes about 12 minutes before they all end up actually being together. I thought that it was smart for us to see their singular lives before we were able to see them kind of all called.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Because then you saw every where they were in their lives. And it was like, yeah, nobody is uh suffering, you know, no one's uh on the streets or anything, but at the same time, yeah, they and they do still get together because um Dara and Robin are supposed to be her bridesmaids when she got when Shurza does get married. However, none of them have talked to Greta for 20 years, so they really just don't know what to expect, but there's a secret, and they just kind of want to keep that quiet because they keep on repeating the line, something like separate, but um together or something like that. Yeah, and also they keep showing the tattoos that they all got tattoos when they were like 16 to 18 years old. And so the road trip comedy quickly gets derailed, though, when Dara puts petrol into the gas tank instead of diesel. Now in the States, we just call it gas. We just call it gas or diesel, right? Right. But there they say petrol, which which is always fun. Um, and then this mechanic guy shows up, Liam, similar to uh Good Doctor. No, what's the name of the show that we did earlier this year that that's uh that got renamed? Oh, Bad Medicine. Bad Medicine, yes. But what was the original called? Uh Doc Martin. Doc Martin. And in that first episode, he also has car trouble. I think he drives off the road.
SPEAKER_00They did the same exact joke here that they did in eighth grade, uh, where like you hear this giant pop song in the background while Liam pops out, but then like the second you see him, it just cuts. It stops.
SPEAKER_01It's pretty obvious that Shurza, despite about to getting married, and we do see her talk to her husband later or her and her engaged uh fiance a little bit later, she has a thing for Liam. They start flirting. Uh, he's younger than her.
SPEAKER_00He's 26, I think.
SPEAKER_01However, he's just very cool as a cucumber dude, and so she's she's a little smitten by him. He takes them to the hotel in Noctara, which is in Donegal, Ireland. However, it's like a very creepy atmosphere, and it's not a real town. And I think part of the reason she made it not a real town was so she could make it as ridiculous and characterized as she does. I agree with you. So it then that's where the horror movie sort of begins, right? They start to change tropes on us, and and and Greta's Facebook is suspiciously taken down. There's this creepy ambience. You get the uh hotel manager who who is a strange dude in his own right, wearing that bow tie.
SPEAKER_00The light of bow tie has to be one of my favorite parts of the episode.
SPEAKER_01They learn that, yeah, that Greta died falling down a flight of stairs while sleepwalking. Now that's a very strange way to die, and they point that out. They go to dinner, they reminisce about the good old days until Shurza sort of reveals that the reason they're really there is not to just celebrate their their friend's life, but instead to make sure that Greta did not divulge to anyone what they did.
SPEAKER_00Right. And this all just felt like it was it was mixing a ton of things uh that were horror comedy, shining veil, big little lies. I had dashes of Atlanta in there because it gets very surreal at different parts of the episode.
SPEAKER_01To me, it's just mostly yellow jackets and pretty low liars, where you half the timeline is presented in the future, where you have these people being like, we cannot tell them about the fire we started in the past, you know, because someone was in that fire. Um, and so the mechanic Liam shows up again while uh Schurza is going out for a smoke, and now he's a cop. So he has two jobs. He's he's a side mechanic, and his real job is to be the cop, and he's actually working um for Greta's husband. Uh, so he has a connection there as well. He flirts, they have this connection again. He gives her the bill, she goes back inside, and the three girls go wild. You know, they say we're not gonna get drunk, and then they get blasted.
SPEAKER_00I don't know why. It reminded me so much of Resident Alien because they start like dancing and then they start seeing like visions of their high school self.
SPEAKER_01Well, I it went from cringy real quick because you got these three people who are trying to dance with a bunch of teens, and then suddenly like it flips as the music flips and they turn it into a clubbing sequence with ghosts of their prior selves because that night it the teens were going to a 90s night.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And they were, even though they grew up a little bit past the 90s, again, 2005, it was close enough in their time where they were connecting with the the types of clothes that those kids were wearing, just as like their versions were going to 70s nights. So then you saw those girls pop in there too, and they were doing the same dancing.
SPEAKER_00They were kind of translucent, though.
SPEAKER_01I thought it was really cool choreography, and I thought it took a scene that at first you are cringing at to like a different level, and then you're like respecting the show. And then it just cuts it straight from there to their hangover the next day, right outside of Greta's family house, their estate. And so they're really hungover. Later on, they question why they felt so good when they got up, and they realized that they were just still drunk when they got up.
SPEAKER_00Um when when we got to that final 15 minutes in the house, that's when the show went from I'm not enjoying it to that much to I thought hilarious.
SPEAKER_01For you, that I think I started realizing how ingenious the show was a little bit earlier than that. But yeah, when they went into the house and it went full horror on you, you had the creepy dudes in the this is what I wanted the burbs to be, to be honest with you, because they had that creepy monster house. And when you go inside there, just play it for all the laughs you possibly can. The Owen guy got me laughing hard. He's the guy from Fool Me One. He is, yes. And then Mrs. Stark was there as Mrs. Heaney. Um, and and they have the actual coffin of the dead bride in the house. Um, and uh, and Greta, so they go and visit Greta, and the daughter then reveals that because uh I guess the family is not exactly like happy that they're there.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01She seems put upon that they're there, they seem put upon that these three have shown up. And so when they divulged that Aunt Gay told them that Greta had passed on, they seem a little like still confused.
SPEAKER_00They all also seem brainwashed, like they're just like all like part of a cult. Yeah, they're they're standing in like just this particular order and they're all just like talking one at a time. They're like staring at them.
SPEAKER_01I thought the way that Greta's mom, Mrs. Heaney, was speaking to them just kind of gave permission to say that this is the way they've always been.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Owen could have been a controlling husband because we saw a Facebook image where he was holding Greta by the neck and it looked a little controlling, you know. Um, but but I I don't think that this family is supposed to be. They're kind of like wedding crashers, like that kid uh in wedding crashers. Oh, you mean the painter dude? Yeah, yeah. Like if all of them were part of that crew. I didn't even make that. Yeah, yeah. That's but uh so yeah, they see the body or Shurza sees the body because she opens the lid to the coffin, she sees that the tattoo is not there, she realizes it's not Greta. Then at the same time, the daughter is revealing that Aunt Gay doesn't exist, she that there is no sister-in-law, and all three of them freak out, they get spooked, and they run out of the bill of the property, despite Owen and uh the brother trying to stop.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, being like, it's it's okay. You know what my favorite part of the whole entire episode was.
SPEAKER_01Was it the jump scare where Owen just suddenly appears in front of the car?
SPEAKER_00It turns into a video game character because he's on the porch and then they there's a second where they all look away and they look back, and Owen is yeah, he's right in front of the car.
SPEAKER_01I just there's several jump scares, but that one was the funniest because at the same time they're arguing about how they lied about not liking leaven lemon something pie or lemon something cake, right? And uh and then they get into a car accident, like they completely flip the vehicle. Well, Owen is chasing after them. Owen is chasing them, and then he gets out of the car, he walks over, and that's when Shirsa wakes up again. Everybody's flipped. I'm sure that for the next seven episodes, like they're not gonna have died in this first episode or anything. But Greta is also alive. We see her on some island somewhere running around in a forest, and that's just the ending reveals.
SPEAKER_00I was I was annoyed with the reveal, reminded me a little bit of Florida Man, where it was like you were supposed to think that character and that died and then ended up being alive. But I remember I gave Vanish props, which was a show that I don't think I gave it passing grade to, but I was glad they didn't go back to the person to show that they were alive, and this is just another one of the shows that did that.
SPEAKER_01I do only have a few cons, and that is one of them. It says just showing Greta alive at the end on an island is probably the least compelling thing about the whole mystery. Um, it also I feel like any of those, you know, those super insane geolocator people who are able to see a picture of like a leaf and tell you exactly where they are. Whenever they watch shows like this, they must be so annoyed because they must know exactly where that person is as soon as they show it, and they're just like, What's the problem?
SPEAKER_00Well, talking about Belfast, can you say a couple things that are places, shows or movies that take place in Belfast? Because I have a list here.
SPEAKER_01I mean, there was the the ones that were up for Oscars pretty recently. The the guy from The Penguin was in one, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean that there's kneecap, which is a Belfast film. Well, that's the yeah, based off the band. Then there's Belfast, the Kenneth Rana movie, which was up for Oscars. There was 71, the Jack O'Connell film. So what am I thinking of? The Colin Farrell one. Was that like a different Irish movie? Yeah, maybe. That was way back. And then uh, but for TV shows, I had the fall, the Gillian Anderson, and Jamie Dornish.
SPEAKER_01One of them, I think Dara was actually in the fall. I think she was one of the characters in that.
SPEAKER_00I didn't even know that. Yeah, I know that uh with Robin, she was from being human, and I was wondering if you recognized Shurza.
SPEAKER_01No, it okay. So another con of mine here is that they the cast beside Shurza is a little bit old for 38. Yes, like they do, especially Robin looks like she's in her mid 40s.
SPEAKER_00You're not you're not the only one who was like, these people are playing way younger than Baby.
SPEAKER_01However, I still enjoyed that. She was probably, despite being the most annoying character and too old for the role, she had the funniest lines. Like hers thing about as soon as she heard Nellie's hot in here being like, that's Greta's song. I just laughed at that. And then she accuses her one-year-old of gaslighting her at one point. Um, and then the the the guy in the hat. Did you catch that? So they the first time that they go into the haunted house, the place where Greta's being uh they show all the pictures on the wall, which is that creepy thing you were talking about, where they're all on the line, they all look like they're in a ball, they have their hands on the ball. On the second round going down those same pictures, suddenly now there's a guy who's tipping his cap on the right side of every single pitcher. It's the weirdest like thing to add.
SPEAKER_00I saw I saw that you uh you you pointed that out upon the first time. And yeah, it's like they purposefully changed it just for that. That again is kind of what I was talking about with the surreal humor about it.
SPEAKER_01That's where the burbs should have learned from their thing. Anyway, so and then also like it starts off with Sure's storyline. I think that she's probably had that happen to her where she's been in the meeting for some sort of written thing, and they're like, why don't you change this? And it's like, because it's this.
SPEAKER_00It's like it's like Eric Kripke with supernatural Amy.
SPEAKER_01We've seen a lot of episode Hollywood critiquing Hollywood, but it's nice to see just like a teeny little nod to it because it's like that's all you need in order to laugh. Um, it's distinctly Irish, which I think is a big deal for her because Dairy and now Belfast, it's filmed there, you can tell. Uh, and then uh the petrol versus the accents, the fact that they make a big deal about Liam finding it like it's or not insulting, but like having that uh interchange with shirts. Right. He says like it's a new one. No one listening to the them speak can realize the difference between their accents unless you're from that area. So I do like that she's putting in jokes specifically for her crowd, even though she knows it's dispersed to everyone.
SPEAKER_00Because I believe that Dairy Girl, I might be wrong about this, but at least for its early seasons, I think that it was very local. Like they that's who they chose to be on the show, um, just like the cast and crew.
SPEAKER_01So I don't know if that also makes genres, but like when this went full horror on us, the lighting, the sounds, the creepy locations, the psycho shower for all three of them, the mysterious tattoo, the the evil backflashes that the jump scares, where like she literally saw her friend as a kid twice or or thrice in this in this whole thing. But that was like a bloody Mary type of thing where she wipes away the stuff from the mirror and it's like phone call that uh Robin receives, and then there's like no one on the other end. I thought those were all really well done.
SPEAKER_00I thought that the intro, uh I I know you kind of talked about, but like it was a it was a cross between I felt Jessica Jones and After Party season two. I'm talking about the actual intro where they show the names and everything. Right.
SPEAKER_01It felt like a paper intro. Like they I don't know how they do those, but yeah. Um, it then also I think my favorite scene was the one that we talked about with the dancing ghosts. Like it started off as my as I was just like, let's get through this. And then by the end, I was just like, oh, it's cool. Like first of all, the actual characters that they assigned for each one of them in yellow jackets. I always had a problem with a couple that like didn't match with how they looked. But for some reason with this crew, I was like, Yeah, no, I believe it. Like just from the dancing, they that's what they were missing. There was dancing in yellow jackets, but they needed to have them both dancing at the same time behind themselves, so that I could have like really understood who was who I sound like an idiot. So so what would you give the show out of 10? Well, I'm not done with my pros. I think the biggest pro is that sometimes when you watch a show that's so clever and that actually has inspiration going for it, you realize why they only have eight episodes because it would be exhausting to write more of them. And it also reminds you about how much mid lame content you're getting now, also packaged in like eight episodes that you're giving a pass to when you shouldn't.
SPEAKER_00So you think that this show is almost it's so good that it's reminding you how bad other TV is.
SPEAKER_01I was so happy when I got to take back the the pyro uh like um pretty little liars comparison and then go back to my original search party thing and be like, yes, this actually does work sort of as a spiritual successor to that show, and I'm all for it. I give this pilot uh an eight out of 10, almost an 8.5 out of 10. I was going back between the two. I will be watching the rest of the show, and I I'm very curious, not only for the mystery, but just for the comedy's sake.
SPEAKER_00I will give it a seven out of 10. Like I said, the first 30 minutes, I thought that there were some clever parts here and there. Liam was probably my favorite character. I thought the last 15 minutes absolutely made up for any type of boringness, though. The show has gotten good reviews. The Guardian gave the series four out of five and put in their title. If you see nothing else this year, watch this. Uh, the Times also gave it four out of five. Hollywood Reporter called it wildly funny and said that it has a resolved ending, even though Lisa McGee has talked about a season two. She said that she left the door open. Fantastic. That's a smart way of going about it. And it has a 93% on raw and tomato, so it's gone. Yeah, good reviews.
SPEAKER_01If you think about all this stuff that people are afraid of with uh AI slop and chat GPT writing TV shows, one of the easiest ways to tell if something is like not giving it at all is if you can predict it. Because what is Chat GPT inherently trying to do? It's trying to give you it. Yes, that was the original take, but it's also it's thinking about what you want to see. And so it's going to give you the most basic sludge of like this is the next thing that goes in order of events. What it doesn't want to do is surprise because it's afraid that surprising is going to be not what you want to see, right? Right. But that's what the need of comedy and what people are are really entertained by is expecting one thing and then getting something that works but is entirely different. Different. And that can only happen is if you're putting your mind into these characters and creating jokes that maybe you've seen in one way or another before, but done in a creative uh way at the time. The arguments that these three people were having felt way more authentic than any of the discussions or arguments that you saw in the burbs, where you were introduced to all the neighbors. Like, as good as Mark Proche is at being weird, like his like the actual dynamic between the characters didn't feel real. While this one felt like, yeah, they could be really like snarky friends to one another. All right. Well, that's it for me. Thanks for listening. How about you? Yeah. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one. Bye.
SPEAKER_00Bye.