Netflix's teen detective show takes on the YA female detective archetype — and the result is better than you think
When we first met Meet Pip, the teenage heroine of The Good Girl's Guide to MurderHer nose is buried in a copy of Jane Eyre While her friends try to buy booze from the local corner store using a fake ID. These are activities that seem appropriate for someone of her age as she prepares for the end of high school in a small English village, followed by a hoped-for admission to Cambridge. But Pip (played by Emma Myers from Wednesday) She has some age-inappropriate plans instead. For a school research project, she decides she's going to solve the mystery of Andy (India Lily Davis), an older girl who disappeared five years ago. The police assume Andy's boyfriend Sal (Rahul Patni) killed her and disposed of the body, and when Sal commits suicide, the case is closed. But Pip doesn't believe Sal did it—partly because she helped Sal reach Andy shortly before she disappeared, and so needs to find an explanation where she's not responsible for someone's death.
The film was adapted by Bobby Coogan from the young adult novel by Holly Jackson, directed by Dolly Wells and Tom Vaughan, The Good Girl's Guide to Murder Fitting into a long tradition of teen detectives on television, from Nancy Drew to Daphne and Velma from Scooby Doo To Veronica Mars. Again, the idea is the contrast between these girls’ sweet, innocent exteriors and the dark secrets they’re trying to uncover. Not everyone Babe knows understands why she does this. She’s constantly in danger of alienating two close friends like Kara (Asha Banks), whose sister Naomi (Yasmine Khediri) was friends with Andy; or Sal’s brother Ravi (Zain Iqbal), who just wants to be left alone. But she can’t stop updating the murder board in her room, whether out of guilt or because it’s just her way of communicating.
“I think sometimes I care about something,” she explained to Kara at one point, “and I can’t think of anything else—even the things I care about the most.”
The Good Girl's Guide This is a well-crafted version of that old formula. The mystery is complex enough to fill only six episodes. Coogan, Wells, and Vaughan do an effective job of portraying the comfort and quiet of Pip’s hometown of Little Kelton—a place where the murder seems as incongruous as the idea of Pip herself investigating it. Myers also makes for a compelling heroine, especially when Pip and Ravi start working together and arguing over which of them is Holmes and which has the “Martin Freeman energy” to be better suited to the role of Watson. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel, nor is it the best possible version of the genre. (If you’re curious, see Veronica Mars (Season one has ended on Hulu.) But as Pip continues to go into more detail than she can comprehend, it's not hard to see why books, TV, and movies return to the original model.
All six episodes of The Good Girl's Guide to Murder The series is now streaming on Netflix. I have watched the entire series.
