Derry Girls creator says the series is ending with season 3: 'It was always the plan'

It's official: we only get one more year with the Derry Girls.

Lisa McGee, the creator and writer of the hit Irish series, confirmed on Twitter Thursday that Derry Girls will be coming to an end with season 3.

Reports from international outlets signaled the coming-of-age comedy would be hitting its series finale, but there was already speculation given how long it took for filming to begin on season 3, which was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as McGee expresses her excitement to start production, she says in a statement that "it was always the plan to say goodbye after three series."

Netflix The cast of 'Derry Girls'

"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," McGee said. "Derry Girls is a love letter to the place I come from and the people who shaped me. It has been an honour to write it and I will be forever proud of everything it's achieved."

Could the characters of Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Orla (Louisa Harland), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), and James (Dylan Llewellyn) return "in some other guise someday"? McGee stated, "Who knows."

"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 on last adventure," she concluded.

Derry Girls, set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1990s, premiered on Channel 1 in the U.K. and Ireland in 2018. As has happened with other shows, Netflix picked up the international rights to the show and released it on the streaming platform later that year, opening it up to a much larger audience.

This past January, Coughlan, who has since gone on to international fame for her part in Netflix's Bridgerton, told The Belfast Telegraph they were still waiting to film because it was "integral to the show that we film in Derry."

"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," the actress said. "But we also want to do the best version of the show we can. By hell or high water, we all want to make it work — if they said we could go tomorrow, trust me, we would all be there."

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