Summary
Emma Myers makes for a very capable lead, but she’s wasted on a rather mundane mystery that takes too long to get going and gets too carried away when it does.
Should teenagers be solving crimes? I’d argue not, but A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder tries to make a case. To be fair, the sleepy setting – a fictional English town in Buckinghamshire – needs their help, since there only seems to be one cop in the place, and let’s just say he’s not exactly reliable.
This is a Netflix adaptation of a very popular book series by Holly Jackson, which is worth pointing out since I suspect the books are better and that fans of them might be a little dismayed. I’m led to believe that the broad plot is much the same, but without the protagonist’s internal voice, the overarching mystery takes too long to find its feet and then attempts too many late swerves once it does.
That protagonist is Pip. She’s played by Emma Myers, who is a clear standout and deserved better material. The case she’s stuck investigating is the disappearance and presumed murder of Andie Bell (India Lillie Davies), whose boyfriend, Sal Singh (Rahul Pattni), committed suicide after taking the blame. But the event has hung over the town for years, and Pip, thanks to both an innate curiosity and a personal investment, believes it isn’t as open-and-shut as people have been led to believe.
There’s nothing wrong with this mystery in its broad strokes, but it has two key issues. One is that it takes ages to become interesting; it’s only in the last couple of episodes, and mainly in the finale itself, that the plot undergoes some major swerves. The second is that it’s bolted to a coming-of-age story rife with cliché and let down by paper-thin and archetypal supporting characters.
Pip is the classic bookish eccentric – she’s investigating the case as a school project – who hangs around with a gang of outcasts. So, she’s battling resistance on two fronts; on the crime side of things she’s trying to investigate a crime that everyone around her considers solved, and on the personal side she’s trying to mix in circles that she’s unsuited to.
Cue, for instance, Pip blagging her way into a debauched cool-kid party. Cue her developing unlikely romantic feelings for her reluctant Watson, Sal’s brother Ravi (Zain Iqbal). Cue catty exchanges with other girls, many of whom are more popular and outgoing, as Pip tries to unravel the circumstances leading to Andie’s disappearance.
None of this stuff is especially interesting. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is notably uninterested in everyone except Pip and Ravi, and even then only in the context of the crime plot, so the young-adult fluff feels pointless. I couldn’t name a single one of Pip’s mates, at least not the ones who don’t factor into the mystery in some way, and to be honest I couldn’t give you a good description of Pip herself beyond her obvious made-for-TV quirks.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder | Image via Netflix/BBC
This makes certain character-based subplots – presumably taken from the book, though I can’t be sure – a little weird. There’s a whole thing about Pip’s stepdad Victor (Gary Beadle) maybe having had an affair at one point that comes out of nowhere, and Pip’s wildly dramatic reaction to it means nothing because we never get much sense of what her relationship with her parents is like.
It helps, to be fair, that the show isn’t very long. At six episodes, all clocking in at under 50 minutes, there isn’t too much time to linger on these elements that don’t work, since so much time is required to set up multiple threads to unravel in a messy, slightly frantic finale. The lack of filler means that the tension is sustained pretty easily once it has been built up, but as mentioned, it takes a dangerously long time to get to that point. I suspect many viewers will lose interest along the way.
But I would recommend sticking it out. The ending of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder contains a couple of reveals that surprised me, and I appreciate that it ends very conclusively without getting the begging bowl out for another season, despite there being two more novels in the series to adapt. Far too often Netflix shows confuse leaving things open for a sequel with leaving the plot completely unresolved.
A second season might be likely, but having said that there are so many similar shows on Netflix alone that it’s hard to imagine how this one will stand out from the pack. It’s fine, but doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before, and does a lot of it in a half-assed way. Mileage may vary, and book fans will be approaching with a different set of criteria entirely, but as things stand for an outsider, a very capable Emma Myers performance isn’t quite enough to distract from all the shortcomings.
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