Their parents are always short on money, sleep, and empathy. The nuns at their all-girls Catholic school police everything. Their classmates are quick to self-sort—the trust-funded stay away from those who are not—and their northern Irish town is caught up in the Troubles, Ireland’s sectarian conflict. Has that stopped Erin, Orla, Claire, Michelle, or James from engaging in the dickheaded solipsism that emerges when you are sixteen, restless, and convinced that you should be both showered with attention and left alone? To my delight, as a repeat watcher of “Derry Girls,” the irreverently charming hit Irish sitcom that is now on Netflix, it has not.

Set in the Irish city of Derry, in the pre-smartphone nineteen-nineties, “Derry Girls” follows four girls and their male English sidekick as they try to make it through high school and life in a cloistered town with minimal embarrassment. They fail miserably at both. Erin (my favorite of the lot) fancies herself a highbrow literary ingénue, far above the suburban plebes who don’t catch her references to Beckett. Her eccentric cousin Orla believes she is gifted at step aerobics, steals and reads Erin’s private diary, and melts things for fun. The foulmouthed Michelle has three obsessions—boys, sex, and swear words—and the frazzled Claire is always the first one to snitch on the group. James, the “wee English fella,” is attending a girls school because of the worry that boys may beat him down for his nationality; the girls subject him to an imaginative array of names, ranging from “ball ache” to “dickweed.” Together, the fivesome flail through mortifying situations of their own making, all while resenting those who have more power over their lives than they do.

This seems fitting. There’s a specific obliviousness that comes from being sixteen, when you’re swept up in anxiety but just lucky enough not to know how unkind the world can be. Derry is a town beset by soldiers, stowaway rebels, and even bombings, but these five teen-agers are busy scheming to get out of a history exam, or trying to get jobs to pay for a school trip to Paris that their families can’t afford. The hilarity lies in their righteous outrage and in the wholesomeness of their shenanigans—devoid of malice, but still spanning the spectrum of adolescent lunacy. “Derry Girls” is a reformed teen’s delight, not just for its fizzy, crackling comedy but for the tenderness with which it treats both the manic restlessness of its teen-age dirtbags and the haplessness of the olds trying and failing to keep them in tow.