[ad_1]
You could easily imagine something like A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, a show that combines Netflix’s two biggest obsessions — teen dramas and true crime thrillers — being coughed up by AI. But as it turns out, the six-episode series is actually based on a book. Now, who’s to say what motivated Holly Jackson to write the novel, but the biggest compliment that one can pay to the show it inspired is that it doesn’t reek of the cynicism that you can smell on so much of the streamer’s other ‘content’. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is fast-paced, undemanding, and moderately well-made, at least for something that doesn’t aim to be anything more than ambient television.
Emma Myers stars as the precocious protagonist, Pip Fitz-Amobi, who is introduced to us with a copy of Jane Eyre in her hands and a noticeable disdain in her heart for her friends’ immature antics. They want her to serve as a ‘decoy’ while they attempt to illegally buy booze at the local liquor store. But the tone becomes a tad more serious not long after this flippant prologue, when Pip decides to do her high school graduation project on a cold case that rocked her sleepy little British town when she was a child. Five years ago, a teenage girl named Andie Bell went missing, with the suspicion immediately falling on her boyfriend at the time, Salil Singh. A day later, he seemingly confessed to her murder and died by suicide before the case could go to trial. Andie’s body was never found.
Also read – One Day review: The perfect Netflix series, a tear-jerker of Titanic proportions
Emma Myers as Pip Fitz-Amobi in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. (Photo: Netflix)
For the entire community, Andie’s apparent murder was an open-and-shut situation, one that nobody — most of all the families of the dead teenagers — wanted to revisit. But Pip had always been doubtful of Sal’s culpability; for one, he was always kind to her, and for another, she always felt a slight degree of guilt for having inadvertently played a role in Andie’s disappearance. And so, in the present day, she resolves to solve the case, despite warnings from her mother, eye-rolls from her friends, and threats from a mysterious someone with secrets to protect.
Pip’s investigation takes her to seedy ragers, in and out of police interrogation rooms, and on one occasion, inside a literal labyrinth. She also joins hands with Sal’s brother, Ravi, who initially bristles at her peskiness, but soon warms up to her after sensing her pure motivations. Pip is, after all, like Nancy Drew crossed with an Enid Blyton character, although at one point, she argues with Ravi about who among them is Benedict Cumberbatch and who’s Martin Freeman. “You’re funny, like some hysterical avenging virgin,” a villainous character sneers at her in one scene, and she replies without missing a beat, “I take that as a compliment.”
Read more – Bodkin review: Obama-produced Netflix comedy-thriller suggests he needs a better retirement plan
Emma Myers as Pip Fitz-Amobi and Zain Iqbal as Ravi Singh in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. (Photo: Netflix)
The fact that Sal — a straight-A student earmarked for Cambridge — was a brown boy only adds new dimensions to the story. Like the landmark first season of the podcast Serial, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder also puts an ensemble of deviant teenagers under the microscope, while Pip encounters a series of increasingly improbable twists in the final third of the show. Some of these plot developments are borderline criminal themselves, and deserve to be dissected in a different show about how not to tell a murder mystery story. It’s like creator Poppy Cogan attended a single lecture at the Cuttputtli school of crime writing, where students are instructed to introduce new information at key junctures of the narrative, without any prior warning. It’s one thing to keep audiences in the dark, but it’s another thing altogether to mislead them.
That being said, the climax is reasonably satisfying, if slightly predictable. A part of the resolution — the most important part — is announced in episode five, but the show quickly pivots to a facet of the case that even Emma had mostly ignored thus far. But A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder cannot decide if it wants to be a quaint homage to British crime dramas, or if it wants to provide edgy, streaming-era entertainment for an audience that has embraced Euphoria. Far from hitting the sweet spot, it exists neither here nor there.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
Creator – Poppy Cogan
Cast – Emma Myers, Zain Iqbal, Cara Ward, Mathew Baynton
Rating – 2.5/5
[ad_2]
