Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee working on New Jersey-set comedy series

Derry-born Lisa McGee is working on FX & 20th TV's Wildwood comedy series set in New Jersey.

McGee is known best for her semi-autobiographical Channel 4 comedy series Derry Girls, released in 2018, which followed a group of teenagers navigating life in Northern Ireland during the 1990s.

The series ran for three seasons and scored Best Comedy wins at the BAFTAs, International Emmys and the Irish Film and Television Awards.

Wildwood is set during the summer of 2000, where a group of Irish college students arrive in Wildwood, New Jersey with no plan of what to do. McGee is the executive producer and creator and it will be her first project outside of Ireland and the UK.

McGee spoke to Hot Press shortly after the Derry Girls series finale in 2022.

"I wanted to be a playwright or a screenwriter, which was a bit naïve because not a lot of working-class girls had been given those opportunities before," she said. "The local people I looked up to were the likes of Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness who write about where they’re from so well, but they were men. Thankfully, that’s changed a bit now."

McGee's work outside of Derry Girls includes writing an episode of the 2022 BBC series Skint and co-creating The Deceived for Channel 5, London Rush for Channel 4, and Raw for RTÉ. Her most recent series, How To Get to Heaven From Belfast, launched on Netflix in February this year.

She has written episodes of C4’s Indian Summers, BBC1/Starz’s The White Queen and BBC3’s BAFTA-winning Being Human.

Her play, Jump!, was adapted into a movie in 2012 and she won a Steward Parker Award for her 2006 play Girls and Dolls.

A release date for Wildwood has not yet been set.