Being a teenage girl is hard. One minute you’re dancing, the next you’re crying. One minute Sally Higgens is your best friend, the next she’s a dumb skank. You worship Ariana Grande – wait, now she’s the Antichrist. Plus, weird things are constantly happening in, on and to your body. It’s exhausting, but if you have good friends you can handle anything.

I’ve been lucky in this regard: the friends I made in high school are my family today, and one of the reasons I’m loving Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls is because of how much the principal characters remind me of us.

Like us, they’re teens in the 1990s, they attend an all-girls school, and they’re constantly getting in trouble. They’re hyperbolic, absurd, sometimes awful versions of us, but they share the same hopes and vulnerabilities of teenage girls the world over.

Set in Derry, Northern Ireland and centred around four teenage girls (and one unfortunate boy), the near flawless sitcom – the first six episodes of which are now streaming on Netflix in the US and Australia – is loosely based on McGee’s life. In this, in its artful cringe factor and masterful scripting, the show is comparable to Lena Dunham’s Girls. But while Girls gave us realism and subtlety, Derry Girls is served with a large side of ham.

And a side of politics too: it portrays the reality of life in Northern Ireland at the time. The Troubles are ever-present, with military blockades creating traffic problems, constant protests threatening to turn violent and the girls debating whether they’d shag an English soldier, enemy number one. Says Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), the show’s vixen-in-training: “Ach, some of them are rides. I’m willin’ to admit it, even if nobody else will because I’m a beacon of truth.”

Growing up in Sydney, Australia, our biggest concerns were which beach to go to and who would sell us cigarettes – but McGee uses humour, nuance and music to normalise the characters’ realities, and offset the political tension. The extremely clever soundtrack acts almost as a reliable narrator and will delight anyone who lived the 90s or has an appreciation for the work of 90s artists like The Cranberries (of course), Salt’n’Pepa, and Blur.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derry Girls (and boy): James, Michelle, Erin, Orla and Clare. Photograph: Jack Barnes

Equally relateable is the group of friends, each an amalgam of classic teen traits and stock comic tropes; and each played exquisitely by a talented young cast. Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) is the awkward straightwoman and lead, looking for love and trying to be good but failing largely by association; Clare (Nicola Coughlan) is altruistic and naive, struggling with her sexuality and experimenting with her identity (“I’m not being an individual on me own!”); Michelle is desperate to be cool, a wannabe bad girl obsessed with sex and frustrated with small-town life; and Erin’s cousin Orla (Louisa Harland) is the weird girl – think Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club meets Phoebe from Friends, always present but never fully there. And then there’s sweet, smart James (Dylan Llewellyn), Michelle’s English cousin – and the butt of most of her jokes.

One of the problems with many shows about teenagers is that they don’t push past cliches: moodiness, horniness, rebelliousness. Rarely presented is the full emotional spectrum, its many triggers and how they manifest. Derry Girls gives us complex unpredictable characters never completely in control of their actions or emotions. They’re as genuine as they are inelegant and surprisingly close to real teenagers – despite the hyperbole.

Erin’s home life is the only one fully shown: she lives in domestic chaos with her parents, grandfather, Orla, Orla’s ditzy mum and a baby who’s parentage is unclear. They’re a close, loving family but her folks are worn down by a full house, the Troubles and working-class life. There’s a wonderful scene in which the girls realise they’re all kind of poor, clambering into full consciousness with the weight of this epiphany, one many will relate to.

The five divide their time between their strict Catholic school, Erin’s house and the town’s well-worn chip shop. Like regular teenagers, their lives are largely mundane, and like regular teenagers, they make their own fun, embarking on adventures that always descend into madness and end in disaster. “It’s not our fault” is the most common sentiment in the show, as it’s perhaps the most common sentiment of teenage life.

Derry Girls is a raw, unapologetic depiction of puberty: a celebration of the ups and downs of modern teenage life and a cringe-worthy reminder of our own misspent youth, picking up where The Inbetweeners left off. In the words of Sister Michael, the formidable head nun at the girls’ school: “If anyone is feeling anxious, worried or maybe you just want a chat, please, please do not come crying to me.”

• Derry Girls is streaming on Netflix in the US and in Australia

