Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Is a Rare Six-Episode Success
Photo Courtesy of Netflix
Okay, maybe a six-episode season of television does have the ability to be good. This has not been the case as of late, with short seasons of TV regularly irritating audiences from all walks of life, but the BBC and Netflix have finally given us a show that has absolutely nailed the microseries format.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is based on the young adult mystery novel of the same name—specifically, the UK edition of the book—and follows Pip Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myer) as she looks into the disappearance of Andie Bell (India Lillie Davies) and the subsequent suicide of her boyfriend, Sal Singh (Rahul Pattni) that occured 5 years before. Pip begins her investigation as a school project and things quickly spiral out from there as she starts digging into the past, attempting to disprove the assumption that Andie’s disappearance was a case of murder-suicide at the hands of Sal.
It is rare that a series is so casually well-rounded. Myers’ performance gives Pip a multitude of layers, from happy-go-lucky to afraid and massively out of her depth. Pip’s ensemble of friends are a believably active part of the story without overwhelming the center thread of Pip trying to find the truth. They, along with Pip’s parents, make it easy to gage how the each development in the case impacts our lead across each episode, especially when it comes to Cara (Asha Banks), whose sister, Naomi (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi), was best friends with Sal and was with him before Andie disappeared.
Despite there being so many people at play, Pip never feels like she is being sidelined in her own show. Her motivations are not out of simple curiosity—Pip saw Andie and Sal the day before Andie’s disappearance and has struggled with thinking that Sal was too kind of a person to ever kill someone, and feeling like her (very minimal) interaction with the pair that day could have lead to Andie’s presumed death. As good natured as she is, Pip approaches her investigation with gumption and almost no tact, tracking people down to find out what they knew about Andie and Sal without much hesitation. Until heavier factors come into play, Pip does not seem to feel any sort of remorse for dragging old feelings about the case up, something that is immediately apparent when she tries to speak to Ravi (Zain Iqbal), Sal’s younger brother. Even so, Myers’ portrayal is so convincingly endearing that this sleuth’s invasiveness does not register as such. The deeper the investigation goes, the more anxious she gets about everything in her life, from angering any of the criminals she aims to expose to realizing that the people she loves might not be as good as she thinks they are.