Netflix has ordered two brand new British comedies from Lisa McGee and Robert Popper at the Edinburgh TV Festival 2026, extending the streamer’s comedy slate with one project already moving toward production. One is Jig, a six-part mockumentary that begins filming in Northern Ireland in 2027; the other is Marbles, which already has an assembled cast.
Jig follows best friends Cara and Fletcher from the struggling Sweeney School of Dance in Derry as they take on rivals in Florida on the way to the World championships. The setup gives McGee a second Netflix project after How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, and it keeps her in the territory she knows best: competitive, status-driven groups where the local stakes feel bigger than the room.
Marbles comes from Popper, whose Friday Night Dinner still sits high in the modern sitcom conversation, and it is built around a family under pressure on two fronts. The series follows a couple raising lively young boys while caring for difficult ageing parents, with Robert Webb, Timothy Spall, Alexandra Roach, Denise Welch and Louise 'Loo' Brealey attached.
Timothy Spall and Denise Welch are set to play the problematic grandparents, which gives Marbles a clear comic engine before a first frame has been shot. That matters because the cast is already locked in while Jig still has no casting announced, a split that makes the two commissions feel at different stages of readiness even though they arrived in the same announcement.
Jig in Derry and Florida
Synopsis for Jig puts the comic geography in sharp focus: “Best friends Cara and Fletcher, from the struggling Sweeney School of Dance in Derry take on their sworn rivals in Florida, a slick, sponsored, seemingly unbeatable operation.” The series is set in the high-stakes world of competitive Irish dancing, but the practical shape of the story is clearer than that premise alone suggests — a small local school, an overseas contest, and the pressure of facing a better-funded rival system.
The six-part order also gives Netflix a cleaner production commitment than a pilot or a one-off special. With filming due to start in Northern Ireland in 2027, the project now has a timetable, a setting and a basic route to screen; the missing piece is the cast.
Marbles and its cast
Synopsis for Marbles describes the series as “laugh-out-loud” and asks, “How do you stop your kids from hiding your keys in a bowl of milk, or sleeping in a cardboard box, while convincing your seventy-five year old father to move out of your bloody house?” It adds, “It’s a glorious mess. And it’s about to get messier.”
That framing signals a domestic comedy built from overload rather than spectacle. Robert Webb, Alexandra Roach, Denise Welch and Louise 'Loo' Brealey give it range across generations, while Spall and Welch as the grandparents point to the source of the friction inside the household.
For Netflix, the appeal is straightforward: two new British comedies from two writers whose previous work already has a visible place in the sitcom rankings. Derry Girls ranked fifth in Radio Times' reader poll of the greatest modern British sitcoms, and Friday Night Dinner ranked sixth, which makes this pair of orders look less like a gamble than a continuation of a proven comic lane.
