About That ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ Ending: Author and Producer Holly Jackson Unpacks Changes and Hopes for Future
[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,” including its ending.]
Sharing similar television DNA to the early aughts teen noir “Veronica Mars” (starring Kristen Bell as the titular teen private investigator investigating the murder of her best friend), a TV gem that was under-appreciated at the time and now proven to be a cult classic, is perhaps one of the highest compliments a teen drama can get these days.
More from IndieWire
That same plucky spirit, aided with piercing wit and a genuinely compelling crime at its center, has been hard to get right in the intervening years. Netflix’s “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,” based on the YA books from Holly Jackson, has a similar magic, thanks to its perfectly cast heroine in “Wednesday’s” terrific Emma Myers, plus a chilling central crime and a fun cast of characters.
For the past five years, Pip Fitz-Amobi (Myers) has been obsessed with the murder case of fellow classmate Andie Bell, who was murdered by her boyfriend Sal Singh. But Pip is convinced Sal didn’t commit the crime and partners up with Sal’s younger brother Ravi (Zain Iqbal) to reinvestigate it (which also doubles as her school capstone project), leading the pair to both answers and the darkness lurking in their quaint British village. As Pip and Ravi become close, they learn disarming truths about Andie, Sal, and their once-tight-knit friend group.
Jackson, the author of two other books that follow Pip’s escapades, serves as EP of the adaptation of her novel with showrunner Poppy Cogan, who adapted it for television. On a recent Zoom with IndieWire, Jackson joked about how she stuck her nose into every aspect of the Netflix adaptation, even if “they didn’t want me to.”
She did that, she said, in order to make sure the magic of the book was preserved for the series’ active fanbase, many of whom Jackson frequently connects with on social media. Her first time as an EP had her giving notes, going to meetings, watching rough cuts of the episodes, even giving ideas for the music. Jackson knew that the interiority of Pip’s narration of the book from solely her perspective peppered with found footage details like maps, journal entries, and transcripts, which work in a novel format, wouldn’t necessarily translate into the television version of the show.
“I can quite literally say, if we did ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ exactly as the book on screen, it’d be a crap TV show. Pip would be at her laptop the entire time tip tapping away. You have to take what’s there and reimagine it for the visual medium,” Jackson said with a laugh.
Those types of changes, where we see flashbacks of other characters, especially those of Andie and Sal, are some of the biggest changes from the book, allowing the audience to forge connections with those characters outside of Pip’s own perception of them. Many of them were ideas, including the frequently occurring one of a young Pip at her locker seeing both Andie and Sal, that Jackson insisted upon. “There are scenes that are new in the show that don’t occur in the book that I came up with and they didn’t even want to do them. And I insisted,” she said. “It’s a flashback scene and it features in four episodes.”
The addition of flashbacks proves effective throughout the series, especially when Pip solves the murder of Andie Bell, using flashbacks to show what happened to Andie.
So, what did happen to Andie? According to Jackson, the ending is pretty similar to the book. Pip discovers that her best friend’s father and schoolteacher Mr. Ward (Matthew Bayton) had been having an affair with Andie, pushing her into a desk in a moment of anger and injuring her head. When Andie disappears, Mr. Ward believes he killed Andie, so to cover up his own tracks, he framed Sal for Andie’s murder, killing him to make it look like a suicide.
While Mr. Ward has plenty of his own fish to fry, including kidnapping a young woman who looked exactly like Andie and keeping her in a secret home he owns, he’s not Andie’s murderer. Pip’s gnawing curiosity and thirst for the truth leads her to Andie’s actual killer: Andie’s sister Becca. Along the way to this discovery, Pip uncovers many unsavory truths about Andie, including her affair with Mr. Ward and even some drug dealing, which aided and abetted serial rapist Max Hastings (Henry Ashton) with obtaining the Rohypnol he drugged his victims with.
After already being severely injured, Andie makes her way back home to a waiting Becca, who confronts her about being raped by Max with the drugs her own sister sold him. As their argument escalates, Becca pushes Andie into a wall, where she crumples on the floor and chokes on her own vomit. Becca doesn’t intervene, but stands and watches her sister die. With Pip now knowing what really happened to Andie, Becca is determined to kill her as well, but thankfully Ravi and Pip’s friends find her before Becca gets the chance after drugging her.
There’s only small differences between the end of the book versus the end of the television show — in the book, Pip presents her capstone project to a group of people and starts a podcast to be able to tell Andie’s story. (And for the kissing crowd, Pip and Ravi share a kiss at the end.) The end of the show thankfully still has Pip and Ravi kiss, but aside from Pip’s confrontation of Max telling him she’s going to make sure everyone he’s hurt gets justice, it’s left fairly open-ended, with just the black ribbons signaling the creepy cave parties held in the woods.
With two other books in the trilogy, there’s plenty of material to work with to introduce Pip’s podcast and the other future crimes she investigates, and Jackson is eager and hopeful that “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” finds its audience to be able to continue to tell Pip’s story.
“I would love to see not just book two [made into a season], but book three is absolutely unhinged. It’s dark, horrible stuff. I didn’t think that they would even let me publish it as a YA book. So to see that as a TV show would just be so amazing,” Jackson said. “I’m a different writer now than I was when I wrote these books. And I’m much more involved in screenwriting. I’m very strict about story structure, so I can see many ways that we can bring the books to life if we get the chance to and just make them even more dynamic.”
“A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is now streaming on Netflix.
Best of IndieWire
The 16 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in August, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal'
The 30 Best True Crime Shows Streaming Now, from 'Under the Bridge' to 'The Vow'
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
