The biggest revelation coming out of streaming might be that there’s enough data now to show that shows filmed within a tighter window and released in a reasonable amount of time perform better and retain more of their audience from season to season than shows with longer breaks. I would say, especially for shows with large ensembles, difficult plot structures, and fantastical worlds we’re somehow supposed to remember years later, that has to be true. I definitely look at certain shows coming up where I know I saw the first season, and there’s a new season coming out, and I have no idea what I’m going to do when it arrives. Am I supposed to rewatch the entire first season ahead of time? Who has time for all of that, all the time?
Luckily, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a little easier to jump back into because it follows a fairly basic structure. We have a young woman, Pip Fitz-Amobi, played by Emma Myers, who is essentially our Harriet the Spy, a young detective throwing herself into crimes and mysteries with seemingly no help or presence from actual police officers. Especially in the second season, when she’s juggling the remnants of what happened in season one while tackling a new mystery, you do kind of wonder: where exactly are the police? Does England have them? Do they exist? Of course they do, because eventually Pip finds her way to a police station, but the show certainly makes them look either inept or apathetic about everything happening around them. Sometimes shows with amateur investigators solve this by pairing them with an actual detective. Elsbeth leans hard on that formula, while something like Apple’s Truth Be Told gave Octavia Spencer’s Poppy Parnell investigative assistance. Here, Pip is mostly relying on friends who have about the same investigative qualifications she does. Pip just has the determination to follow through.
Last season, Pip had to solve some tragic deaths while also making sure that Max Hastings was held accountable for his crimes. At the beginning of season two, Max is in the middle of his trial, and we quickly see just how powerful his family is. Max is also an increasingly frightening narcissist who seems convinced that consequences are things that happen to other people. Even his mother starts to see him for who he really is, and Max does not particularly enjoy that revelation. Meanwhile, Jamie Reynolds goes missing, and his brother Connor seeks Pip’s help finding him before it’s too late. There are suggestions of erratic behavior and possible foul play, while the police don’t seem particularly invested. Pip, of course, wants to make sure Jamie is found. Her attention becomes divided between keeping the promises she made after season one by seeing Max put away and finding her missing friend.
That sends Pip on a frenetic chase to solve two parallel, and possibly eventually converging, problems with the help of the handful of people she trusts. One of those is her boyfriend, Ravi Singh, who discovers pretty quickly just how far Max and his family can reach when he becomes collateral damage in the battle between Pip and Max. Ravi still stands by Pip and remains one of the more reliable supporting characters this season. Most of the time, though, Pip is bouncing between members of the ensemble as though the series is trying to keep everybody around just in case they become more relevant in future seasons based on the other books. Certain characters have nowhere near the screen time they had in the first season, and Pip doesn’t really need most of them to achieve what she’s trying to accomplish.
I struggled with the season because it’s constantly pulling us in two different directions. A lot of Pip’s attention is taken up by trying to find Jamie, and while his mystery is certainly interesting, it’s also kind of disappointing when you finally get to the end of it. Then Max’s storyline also resolves in an unsatisfying way. By the end of the season, I wasn’t left feeling like we won, Pip won, or really that anybody was better off for having Pip in their lives. It all kind of sinks into the bottomless pit of despair the season created for itself. There isn’t really a great ending to any of this, which makes me wonder why they chose to tell this particular story this particular way. Netflix is not exactly generous when it comes to renewals, swinging that cancellation axe like a whirlwind, so either they feel incredibly confident in the show’s cost-to-viewership ratio, or they took a gamble that may or may not pay off. Emma Myers is also a series regular on another little Netflix show called Wednesday, so that will keep her busy, as will likely any other offers she gets. Keeping audiences happy and making them desperately want another season would seem like the best route to go. I don’t think they achieve that here.
Max is ramped up to be even more of a pretentious narcissist than he was previously, trying to threaten his way out of his predicament and discovering that Pip has almost no fear when it comes to her own self-preservation. When intimidating Pip directly doesn’t work, he starts going after the people around her, trying to make her regret ever coming into contact with him. Then you have the Jamie storyline, where Pip is trying to figure out why it suddenly looks like he went completely off the rails and started acting totally out of character. Is Jamie missing? Dead? Involved in a crime? It starts out deliberately vague before pushing into fake online profiles, someone taunting Pip, and the suggestion that another person knows more than she does. It slowly pushes Pip over the edge, and she makes some bold swings toward the end of the season because she has clearly had enough. Even her decision early in the season to turn her previous investigation into a podcast comes back to bite her, and then the podcast concept is mostly abandoned to make room for everything else.
This is a show that threw a lot of ingredients into a blender and tried to make a milkshake without stopping to ask whether those ingredients belonged in the same milkshake. After taste-testing the second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, I’m not entirely sure they made one. The series relies heavily on Emma Myers and her growing likability and screen presence. It relies far less on its supporting cast because it has a hard time giving them anything to do aside from being in proximity to Pip at any given moment. Aside from Pip, Max is one of the only characters who really gets substantial time away from her. Nearly the entire supporting ensemble exists on screen to assist Pip, challenge Pip, answer Pip’s questions, or give Pip someone to talk to. It’s weird for a show with an ensemble this size to have supporting characters who seemingly have nothing to do outside of orbiting its lead.
We’re in the second season now, and some of those first-season characters should have started establishing their own personalities, stories, and lives. Instead, because season two is still interested in stretching out the events of season one while simultaneously having Pip solve an entirely new mystery within its limited number of episodes, it’s asking a lot of itself. Characters are either reflecting on what happened in season one or helping resolve the new case in season two. They don’t have enough time to grow independently, allowing the camera to follow them and develop their backstories, wants, desires, families, or anything else that might exist outside Pip. Everybody is seen through Pip, as Pip sees them and as Pip interacts with them, instead of as individual human beings capable of making choices without her. The best thing this show could do in a third season might be to take Pip off the board for an episode and force everyone else to contribute uniquely without everything filtering through her.
That structure works better on something like Elsbeth because that show was created specifically around Carrie Preston’s character. Here, while Pip is absolutely the lead, she has a sizable ensemble surrounding her, and presumably we’re supposed to actually get to know these people. Otherwise, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder could have started with a much smaller ensemble, allowing characters from season one to simply disappear when they were no longer necessary. Here, there’s either a lot of treading water or a lot of dead weight, and I can’t tell which without knowing what the plans are for season three and how they intend to utilize everyone who isn’t Emma Myers.
That’s ultimately what made this season tougher for me to review, because I don’t think this is a bad show. I think it’s a show struggling to find its footing and its own identity in a sea of like-minded programs. It sees its competition. It knows what other shows are doing, and it thinks it can borrow pieces of those formulas, but the successful ones have generally found a much better rhythm. Reacher, for example, pretty much goes it alone. From season to season, there’s an incredibly small amount of character carryover. He meets the people he needs within the confines of that particular story, and the show doesn’t pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, crime procedurals like Law & Order or Criminal Minds embrace being ensembles, allowing stories to pass through multiple characters instead of making everything dependent upon one person. Here, it is clearly Pip’s story. She is the good girl, and this is her guide to murder. But the series still hasn’t figured out how its supporting cast is supposed to factor into that.
I haven’t read Holly Jackson’s novels, and it’s entirely possible they do these characters far more justice than the series does. In a film adaptation, underdeveloped supporting characters can easily be chalked up to having to condense a novel into two hours, with things inevitably ending up on the cutting-room floor. When you have an entire television season, it becomes harder to use runtime as an excuse for poor character development. The audio description here was fine and has all the necessary elements for an audience to follow a mystery this busy. It should also get some bonus points for managing an excruciatingly large ensemble, some new to this season and others returning, many with very limited things to do. The show treats them like they’re part of this big family solving the case together, even though Pip is doing most of the work and is only occasionally accompanied by whichever character happens to be available.
If you’ve ever played Mass Effect, it almost feels like that. You have your lead character that you have to play as, and then you pick who you’re taking with you on any given mission. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder sometimes feels like the murder-mystery version of that, where Pip gets to select different supporting characters to accompany her at different times, except we know far more about Pip than we do about almost anybody joining her. I’m rooting for this to get a third season because I want to see whether it can bounce back and find a way to either trim its cast to something manageable or actually write a season that supports all of them. By a third season, many of these characters will have been around for two previous seasons. Give them reasons to still be there. Continue developing them. Make them feel like real parts of this universe instead of sounding boards for Pip.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder remains an okay introduction to a murder-mystery series. It isn’t bad. It just has no idea what to do with its very large cast, and the ending to the second season is both depressing and underwhelming. Emma Myers continues to be the show’s greatest asset, and Pip remains a character worth following. Now the series needs to figure out whether everybody following her around is worth following too.
Fresh: 6.5/10
