GOODNIGHT GIRL
Created by Hiram Harrington & Janna Kemperman | Written by Hiram Harrington
Produced by Maggie Ryan | Directed by Janna Kemperman
Dark Dramedy | 8 episodes x 40-50 minutes
LOGLINE: Realising their friend Courtney is to be buried as a man by her willfully ignorant biological family, four estranged misfit queers spark chaos in a small Irish town as they reckon with her death - and with each other.
SYNOPSIS
Courtney Gallagher is dead, and her funeral is about to start a war.
Meet two households, both alike in dysfunctionality.
On one side, enter Courtney’s chosen family: gay undertaker Abeo Abayomi, lesbian Catholic inflfluencer Jude, trans anarchist Manon, and stubborn drag queen Dominique. Gone their separate ways after college, the once tight-knit gang are drawn to St. Brigid’s, the small town where Courtney, Manon, Abeo, and Jude grew up, for Courtney’s funeral. On the other, enter Courtney’s biological family: her meticulous mother Elaine, her emotionally constipated father Fergal, and her moody football star brother Fionn. Shaken by Courtney’s sudden death, the friends make a horrifying discovery at her wake: Elaine and Fergal have presented Courtney’s body as a man’s, and are calling her by her birth name, “Oisín”.
Divided on how to reconcile this disturbing situation, they make a botched attempt to steal Courtney’s body. Only, they crash right into Elaine and Fergal’s car, and their lives. So begins the gang’s quest to fifind a way to do right by Courtney in death - although none of them can agree on what that is. All they know is, they can’t leave until Courtney’s laid to rest as her true self. Facing a rescheduling of Courtney’s funeral and the sudden cremation of her body after the crash, the friends stay in St. Brigid’s to convince Elaine, Fergal, and Fionn to respect Courtney’s decision to transition, even in death. When this fails, the four take every opportunity to do what they think is “right” by Courtney. However, they’re tripped at every turn by the town priest, Father Ignatius, who believes fully in the right of the Gallaghers as the blood relatives. Elaine and Fergal repeatedly force down their grief with denial, but it only pushes Fionn away. Under the pressure of a looming football fifinal, Fionn struggles to understand which family really cared for Courtney the most - and how his sibling would have wanted to be remembered.
Across the season, Abeo struggles to balance supporting his raucously queer mates with the desire he has to live a quiet, undisturbed life at his father’s funeral home. Manon needs the love of the four friends to get through Courtney’s death, but can’t stop testing how far this love can go. Jude “desperately” wants to say goodbye to Courtney and move on from this chapter in her life, but there’s something about Dominique, and the appearance of her overeager divorced father Rían, that she just can’t move on from. Dominique fifights fifiercely, at fifirst, to save Courtney’s body from an eternal misgendering, but quickly realises her green card marriage in Dublin has left her deeply lonely. It’s this found family they once had together that she really needs back. Courtney’s death is the catalyst for these complicated people to reckon with what they mean to each other. Across one week in St. Brigid’s parish, Goodnight Girl asks - what makes a family? And, more importantly - what makes a family so damn complicated?
TONE
Goodnight Girl is a drama, sure, but we know how crazy this sounds: four messy queers in their twenties try to steal a dead woman’s body? Yikes. Rather than tell a straight parable, we revel in the ridiculousness of the situation. Just as our core quartet survive on the Irish penchant for not taking anything too seriously, the series never strays far into melodrama. Think the morbid humour of Six Feet Under meets the colour-drenched heightened reality of Euphoria. Goodnight Girl talks about the real Ireland today, showing modern attitudes to diverse identities - but also meaning our Irish characters can rarely say what they feel, shrouding their emotions in jokes and slagging.
THEMES
Goodnight Girl tackles the subjects of chosen family, friendship, grief - and death, in every which way possible: the literal loss of a loved one, the figurative end of one life, and the beginning of another. Death is the great unifier, the great equaliser, and the greatest catalyst for the living. The group’s loss of Courtney, someone they all loved dearly, pushes them to put their pettier differences aside and act as the family she made them. Goodnight Girl deals with the complicated nature of familial relationships, both the ones we’re born into, versus the ones we choose.
What does acceptance of who we really are look like? We’re with the gang as they learn the hard way to let go, and when they learn to hold on until their fingers bleed. Ultimately, they grapple with one of the hardest questions life can throw - how far would you go for someone you love?
Most of all, Goodnight Girl is about identity. Trans identity, sure, but more importantly - when we’re gone, how will we be remembered? What memories will people have of us? Does one person’s idea of us make us who we are? This show grapples with what it means to preserve someone’s memory, versus destroy it, from the two different families Courtney had in her strange life.
