'A Good Girl's Guide to Murder' Offers Plot Twists but Little Logic

By Nate Parker | TV | August 9, 2024 |

By Nate Parker | TV | August 9, 2024 |

Pippa Fitz-Amobi (Emma Meyers) has a guilty conscience. The whole town believes that five years ago, Sal Singh killed his girlfriend, Andie Bell, before taking his own life. Only Pippa knows she told an upset Sal where to find Andie on that infamous day. But Pippa’s convinced of Sal’s innocence and chooses to investigate the murder as a school project. What follows is a twisty, turny path through a couple WTF reveals that occasionally make sense, buoyed up by a charismatic cast with great chemistry.

A Good Girl’s Guide takes your typical true crime story — pretty white girl with a hidden, sordid personal life vanishes without a trace, her brown boyfriend the only suspect — and gussies it up for the YA crowd. Pippa’s trying to figure out the right college for her. Her best friend Cara (Asha Banks) has a crush on the popular mean girl and happens to be the younger sister of Andie’s best friend. There’s a smug rich kid (Henry Ashton) who always seems like the perfect suspect. And there’s Ravi Singh (Zain Iqbal), Sal’s younger brother, with his sad eyes and awareness that brown kids don’t get the benefit of the doubt. Meyers and Iqbal work their way through a that’s sweet and believable, even as Pippa’s inability to control her actions lands her in danger time and again.

I’ve ranted about this before, with the Locke children’s lack of survival instinct. Pippa is not such an extreme case. But she Nancy Drews herself into dangerous situations with disheartening regularity, and only her big eyes and deus ex machina get her back out. Meyers is great in her role and paints teen vulnerability over a strong core very well. The lifelong friendship with Cara feels genuine, as does her cautious approach to first love. Her parents (Anna Maxwell Martin, Gary Beadle) are supportive and balanced, with mom Leanne more safety conscious than her free-spirited father. The town of Little Kilton has the same economic stratification as Veronica Mars’s Neptune, CA, and it adds to the friction between Pippa and her carousel of suspects.

The well-written relationships are balanced out by an increasingly complex plot that doesn’t always make sense. Like any good murder mystery, it comes with a number of plot twists, each more elaborate than the last and culminating in reveal gonzo enough to be a subplot of The Beekeeper. More believable are the hidden infidelities, corrupt cops, and frankly terrible men that make up the local community.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is the first book in a series, and it shows. The Smudge assures me they get better as they go, and I’m interested to see if the book’s popularity translates into enough viewers for a second season. Netflix has certainly given worse shows a better shot.

All 6 episodes of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder are available now.