Netflix Cancels the Belfast Hit America Never Ranked

Netflix has cancelled How to Get to Heaven from Belfast after one season, and the eight episodes already online are the whole show. The streamer confirmed on 24 September that the Lisa McGee comedy-thriller will not come back.

The decision lands more than seven months after the 12 February launch, on a series that hit No. 1 in Ireland and the UK and never appeared on the daily Top 10 in the United States. Channel 4 had already walked away once the budget outgrew a British commission. Netflix paid to finish it, then applied the global test the first home never had to meet.

The Belfast Thriller Stops After One Season

The eight-episode comedy-thriller from Lisa McGee follows three friends from Belfast, played by Roísín Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne, who drive to Donegal for the funeral of a fourth schoolmate and find the death will not sit still. Saoirse is a chaotic TV writer, Robyn a stretched mother of three, Dara a carer who keeps the others upright. McGee told Netflix’s Tudum site it was the show she had always wanted to make, a mash-up of mystery and comedy, “an Irish odyssey full of twists, turns, and arguments about eyelash extensions.”

Hat Trick Productions made it with McGee’s Derry Products banner, the same firm behind Derry Girls. Michael Lennox directed the first block. All eight episodes dropped at once. McGee and the three leads have not commented since the axe.

The trailer still sells the joke and the corpse in the same breath.

A No. 1 Hit That Missed the United States

At home the show behaved like a hit. Tracker Kasey Moore’s daily Top 10 tallies put it at No. 1 in Ireland for a 26-day stretch and at No. 1 in the United Kingdom across a 20-day run. It reached 16 countries’ daily Top 10 lists in total. That is a strong local launch. It is also a map with a hole in it.

WHERE THE DAILY TOP 10 STOPPED

Norway, New Zealand and Australia were the next best English-speaking and Nordic stops, each with 12 days on the list. Canada and the Netherlands barely registered. The United States, the market that makes a Netflix season-two maths problem solvable, did not chart the show at all.

That gap is why a British cancellation fight never really formed online. Viewers who loved it said so in the places that had ranked it. One Irish watcher called it a pile of feck and moved on. There was no American campaign, because there was no American chart run to defend. The Boroughs, another Netflix mystery that critics liked, was already gone after one season. Heaven joined it without a US argument attached.

Channel 4 Dropped the Show When the Scale Blew Out

Channel 4 announced the series in August 2023, with Caroline Leddy, Liz Lewin and Jimmy Mulville of Hat Trick attached. By March 2024 it had moved to Netflix. A Channel 4 spokesperson said the broadcaster had “loved” the script and offered “a substantial license fee to be its UK home,” then listed the reasons the plan collapsed.

WHY CHANNEL 4 LET IT GO

• Editorial drift: The spokesperson cited “changes in editorial direction as the development process progressed.”
• Rising costs: The scale McGee wanted no longer fitted a UK licence fee, even a large one.
• US money dried up: A “cooling in the U.S. co-production market” left Channel 4 without an international partner.

McGee has been blunt about that fork. She wrote the pilot on spec and, with Lewin, watched it stop looking like a Channel 4 show. “If I was to go back I would work that out earlier, but I didn’t know what way the story was going to go,” she said. Netflix, she added, was “100% the right place for this show,” and she praised a streamer that “didn’t interfere” beyond an outside eye on some scenes, plus “a handsome budget.”

The same budget that saved the series is the one Netflix now has to recoup. Malta stood in for Portugal. London doubled for Saoirse’s other life. Donegal roads, a Carnlough hotel and a County Down lighthouse filled the rest. That is not a three-set sitcom. Channel 4 comedy boss Charlie Perkins still says the relationship with McGee is “so strong” and that “life is long.” The bill for this particular odyssey went elsewhere.

When I started writing the pilot I didn’t really know where it was going and then quite quickly myself and Liz realized the scale of it was different and it wasn’t a Channel 4 show.

Lisa McGee, creator, interview before the premiere

The Next Job Is a Six-Part Dance Mockumentary

Netflix did not drop McGee. On 26 August, at the Edinburgh TV Festival, it ordered Jig, a six-part mockumentary she is writing about competitive Irish dancing. Cameras are due in Northern Ireland in 2027. Orchid Pictures produces, with Liz Lewin, Caroline Leddy and Suzanne Mackie executive producing beside her.

The logline is leaner than a cross-border murder run. Best friends Cara and Fletcher, from the struggling Sweeney School of Dance in Derry, take on a slick, sponsored rival school in Florida on the way to the world championships. Six episodes. One sport. No Malta unit. It is the shape of show a streamer can keep on a smaller ticket, and it was already in the diary a month before Heaven was formally killed.

McGee had flagged that test in February. She had left a door open, including a bag whose contents she said she already knew, and a killing she was willing to pick up. She also named the only condition that mattered.

I’ve left it open for a second series but it’s all completely down to how many people watch. I’d love to do one.

Lisa McGee, creator, February 2026

People did watch, in Ireland and Britain. The second commission tells you which audience Netflix intends to pay for next, and it is the Derry comedy voice, not another eight-hour thriller with a travel bill.

What BARB’s 1.8 Million Does Not Measure

British coverage of the axe keeps returning to one domestic figure. BARB numbers compiled by overnights.tv put the opening episode at 1.8 million viewers in its first seven days, a UK top-ten start. That is a real audience. It is also a seven-day, one-episode, UK-only count, the sort of tally linear schedulers still understand and Netflix does not use as a renewal bar.

THE FIGURES THAT TRAVELLED, AND THE ONES THAT DID NOT

• UK seven-day start: 1.8 million for the opening episode, per BARB via overnights.tv.
• Critics: Rotten Tomatoes logged a 95 percent score from critics for the season.
• US daily Top 10: no appearance on the list that decides whether a Netflix original is a global title.
• Season order: one, and now closed.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO, described the company’s rule in 2023 and has not walked it back. Shows that “talk to a very small audience on a very big budget” get cut, he said. “We have never cancelled a successful show.” Success, in that sentence, is not a UK overnight or a fresh score on a review site. Heaven was well liked by critics and large at home. It still fits the box he drew: a small global audience, paid for at the scale that made Malta possible.

A lot of these shows were well-intended, but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget. The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, 2023 interview

Derry Girls had already proved McGee could travel, after Channel 4 built a sitcom and Netflix carried it abroad. Heaven reversed the order. The streamer funded the bigger canvas first, then found the canvas did not move in the United States. The 1.8 million figure explains why British viewers are baffled. It does not contradict the US blank on Moore’s chart.

111 Days on the Road, Then a Hard Stop

Northern Ireland Screen’s production record lists 111 days of filming across 2024, from 28 June to 7 December. That is a long shoot for eight hours of TV, split across three director blocks: Lennox, then George Kane, then Rachna Suri. Brian Falconer produced. The series also drew production funding from Northern Ireland Screen, which staged a Queen’s Film Theatre premiere in Belfast on 4 February.

First Minister Michelle O’Neill was there and called the production “testament to our thriving film and creative arts industry,” and “another brilliant creation from the fabulous Lisa McGee.” The local industry did get the days, the crew and the locations. It does not get a second season of this title.

FROM CHANNEL 4 ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE AXE

1. August 2023: Channel 4 announces How to Get to Heaven from Belfast with Hat Trick.
2. March 2024: The series moves to Netflix after the UK funding plan fails.
3. 28 June 2024: Filming starts; the shoot runs 111 days through 7 December.
4. 4 February 2026: Premiere screening at Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast.
5. 12 February 2026: All eight episodes land on Netflix worldwide.
6. 26 August 2026: Netflix orders McGee’s six-part Jig at Edinburgh.
7. 24 September 2026: Netflix confirms there will be no second season.

The season is still on the service. The story McGee left in the bag stays there. Jig is the title that still has a start date, and she has not added a public word about the one that does not.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where Was How to Get to Heaven from Belfast Filmed?

Most of the shoot was in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, with extra work in London and in Malta, which stood in for Portugal. Specific stops included Belfast, the Harbourview Hotel in Carnlough, St John’s Point lighthouse in County Down, Mamore Gap and Inishowen in Donegal, and Dublin. Saoirse’s London life was shot around the South Bank.

Who Else Wrote How to Get to Heaven from Belfast?

McGee wrote the first three episodes and, for the first time, ran a writers’ room on the middle stretch. Ava Pickett, Bronagh Taggart and Tobias Beer, who is McGee’s husband, took on later blocks. She has said she wrote Derry Girls alone and would rather keep a room on shows like this.

Is How to Get to Heaven from Belfast a Derry Girls Sequel?

No. It is a separate story about three women in their late 30s, not the teenagers from the sitcom. The Derry Girls mural appears in episode 8, and Saoirse-Monica Jackson has a cameo in the trailer, but the leads, the plot and the genre are new even though Lennox, Leddy, Lewin and Hat Trick came back.

What Age Rating Does How to Get to Heaven from Belfast Carry?

The series is rated 15 in the UK and TV-MA in the United States. Metacritic’s weighted score sits at 79 out of 100 from 13 critics, in the “generally favorable” band, beside the Rotten Tomatoes season score in the body above.