Erin, Michelle, Orla, Claire and the wee English fella will soon return for one last bit of mischief as the wait for Derry Girls season 3 is almost over.
“Derry Girls is a coming-of-age story following five ridiculous teenagers as they slowly… very slowly… start to become adults, while around them the place they call home starts to change too and Northern Ireland enters a new more hopeful phase — which was a small, magical window of time,” the show’s creator, Lisa McGee, wrote via Twitter in September 2021. “Derry Girls is a love letter to the place I come from and the people who shaped me. It has been an honor to write it and I will be forever proud of everything it’s achieved.”
She concluded: “Who knows if Erin, Clare, Orla, Michelle and James will return in some other guide someday, but for now this is it for us and we’re excited to start filming this series with our incredible cast and crew to hopefully take our loyal fans on one last adventure.”
Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1990s, Derry Girls chronicles the adventures of a group of friends — Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), Orla (Louisa Harland), Claire (Nicola Coughlan) and James (Dylan Llewellyn) — as they navigate the equally treacherous situations of political upheaval and adulthood. However, as Ireland begins to find peace, the teens are beginning to get settled in their own lives and figure out what they want.
“I spoke to Lisa McGee recently and she talked me through the storylines. They’re so brilliant, which doesn’t surprise me — she’s just incredible — but it made me want to do it right now,” Coughlan told the Belfast Telegraph in January 2021. One month later, the Bridgerton star wrote via Twitter that “the storylines in this series are the best we’ve ever done.”
The Ireland native continued to tease the new episodes in October 2021, telling the UK’s Radio Times that she “cried and cried” after reading the season 3 scripts. “I think it’s a lot more of an epic scale this time,” Coughlan said at the time. “Lisa knew she had huge ambitions with this one, [with] what she wanted to do. She’s a genius. Like, there’s not really any other word for her. She just – everything is so brilliantly balanced and nuanced and the characters, there’s so much detail in every single character in those scripts.”
She continued: “It’s really magical. … It’s bittersweet, but I think we’re sending it off in style.”
Keep scrolling to find out everything we know about the third and final season of Derry Girls — including whether or not James and Erin will finally realize their feelings for one another: