Emma Myers is 'too scared' to check fan reaction to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder has a huge fanbase behind it, so much so that BBC series star Emma Myers has yet to look at how they've responded to the adaptation because she's "too scared" to look.
The BBC show adapts Holly Jackson's novel of the same name, which is the first in an acclaimed trilogy. It follows Myer's Pip Fitz-Amobi as she investigates the disappearance and apparent death of teen Andie Bell five years earlier, with the would-be detective set on clearing the name of her late boyfriend Sal Singh who was accused of her murder before his own death.
Despite the show being out since 1 July, Myers admits to Yahoo UK that she hasn't yet checked what fans think of the show, revealing: "Honestly, I've been too scared, I've been kind of avoiding social media.
"I wanted to give it until after it's going to be released on Netflix [in the US on 1 August] to give it some time to settle in, and then I figured I'd go and and see how people are feeling about it. So far my family have relayed to me that people are happy, so I guess I could go online and see.
"But honestly, once I get on there then I go down a rabbit hole, and then it's just never ending. So I figured it's best if I just leave it."
Jackson's novel is so beloved that any change to the narrative might be seen as sacrilege by some fans, but there have been some made – big and small – in the TV series. Myers says that it is "always hard when you're adapting something from anything" to recreate it in a way that will please new viewers and fans of the original.
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"Depending on how many episodes you have it's hard to fit everything in and make it to where there's a reason that it should be in," she reflects.
"I felt like they fit in what they could, everything isn't going to be the same. Nothing's ever going to be the same because the book isn't the script, but I thought they did a good job with what they had.
"And you know, if we do a second season then we can bring some elements that maybe were missing from the first season, that would be fun. But yeah, I think they did a great job. It's never going to be exactly the same but I think it was alright."
For Myers there was only one person whose opinion mattered about the series: Holly Jackson. The author has been closely involved with the show since the early stages, something that Myers appreciated immensely: "The one person that I wanted to please the most was Holly, as long as she was happy with things then nothing else matters.
"It was great having her, I would ask her so many questions, she would answer all of them. I talked to her quite a bit about this show and I would text her saying, 'Holly what do you think I should do for this, or for this?' and she'd come up with great ideas.
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"This is her child, this is her creation, and I just wanted to make sure that we were getting it all right for her because I can't imagine how scary it is to just give your child into the hands of other people and see what they do with it. It was great having her around, I love her. She was such a good support for all of it so I'm definitely glad that she was around."
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is out on BBC iPlayer now, and it will air on BBC Three from Wednesday, 10 July at 9pm.
