Pippa Fitz-Amobi, the protagonist of Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, is a British, modern day Nancy Drew. I say this not to cheapen the show, but to let you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s not a modernization of Nancy Drew, like the CW show that aged up the characters, just a character who was obviously heavily inspired by the curious youth from the original novels. Although, in both adaptations, our intrepid teen detective has a queer best friend.

The biggest difference between Pippa (Emma Myers) and predecessors like Nancy Drew — or even Harriet the Spy — is that Pippa isn’t in it for the love of the game. She doesn’t, as far as I know, have ambitions of becoming a detective or opening a PI agency. The mystery Pippa sets out to solve is personal.

Pippa reads Jane Eyre, that’s how you know she’s clever.

It’s been five years since a local girl, Andie Bell, went missing, and while the town considers this mystery solved — Andie’s boyfriend Sal confessed — something about the case has always bothered Pippa. For one, she knew Sal, and didn’t believe him to be capable of murdering Andie, and also, Pippa saw Andie and Sal the day before Andie went missing. So when it comes time to do her EPQ, a research paper British students write as they prepare to apply to university, Pippa decides to look into Andie’s case. She is determined and curious and a bit fearless as she interviews Andie’s peers and tries to piece together the truth, no matter where it takes her. And it does, of course, take her to dangerous places.

As I mentioned, the good news is, Pippa’s best friend Cara (Asha Banks) is queer. The bad news is, despite them regularly holding hands, and generally being quite cuddly, sadly Pippa is not her girlfriend.

You can see how I thought, briefly, that they were a thing.

We find out Cara is queer when it’s revealed she has a crush on a girl named Ruby (Orla Hill). We meet Ruby briefly at a party when she asks Cara to dance, and again for a second at school. But ultimately Cara’s queerness is inconsequential, which is kind of nice. To be honest, we don’t really get to know any of Pippa’s friends too deeply, because she’s very much the main character, both literally in the show, and also in her life. She gets so focused on solving the mystery at hand that she sometimes forgets to look up from the murderboard at how she’s affecting the people around her.

I think this happens a lot when books are adapted for television. In a book, it makes sense when we’re in the main character’s head the whole time, or focused on their events and point of view. In a TV show, it can sometimes make secondary characters feel a little two-dimensional, as the world literally and metaphorically revolves around the main character.

Take our other queer character, Jesse, for example. They show up two separate but important times, and I had the feeling this character came off the page fully formed. But there were things the TV medium simply wasn’t telling us about them. Jesse is played by trans actor Oliver Wickham and I hope if there are future seasons to this show we get to know more of their story.

However, to its credit, the queerness didn’t feel shoehorned in, unnatural, or done to check diversity boxes. Sometimes the insertion of a queer character can feel almost condescending, like “hey you can’t yell at us, look we made this one person queer, oh did you not hear that one throwaway line, oh well, we still get credit for it!!” But this isn’t the case in this story. There is no doubting Cara is queer (Pip even uses the word), and while I don’t remember what pronouns (if any) they used for Jesse, they are clearly androgynous/gender non-conforming. There are no big reveals, no hoopla, no conflict regarding any of the queerness on the show. It’s just simply a fact, presented with the same weight as the fact that Pippa has a younger brother.

Plus, it’s not like the queer characters are the only ones not as fully fleshed out as they may have been in the book, or may have been if there were more than six episodes of the show. The same can be said for Pippa’s other friend Lauren (Yali Topol Margalith), the boys in their friend group whose names I’m not even 100% sure were said on screen, and even Pippa’s family.

Despite the fact that I would have loved more time to get to know more of the characters as the mystery unraveled, I did really enjoy this show. It was a clever mystery, it had moments of tension and stress, it had humor and heart. (I will also say it has a few dark themes, so if you have any specific triggers, you might want to check Does the Dog Die.) I felt like we were given enough clues to have our own theories without the answers being obvious. It was a fun watch.

Also, in a trend that I’ve been seeing more of lately, these teenagers felt like they were being depicted as actual teenagers.

Classic teen car behavior!

Pippa’s core group of friends aren’t the oversexualized teens played by 30-year-olds we used to be fed. The actors aren’t all that far away from their teen years, and they aren’t hypersexualized at all. They felt more like authentic teenagers than teen characters do in a lot of shows, especially young girls, and I think that’s because it was a very female-heavy production. It’s a female showrunner (Poppy Cogan), adapting a novel from a female author (Holly Jackson), and every episode is either written or co-written by a woman. Even the director of the first three episodes are women. This isn’t to say men are incapable of portraying teenagers correctly, but it does often make a difference to have this many women involved.

So if you’re looking for a little bite-sized mystery, helmed by a determined, clever girl on a quest for the truth, I definitely recommend A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. While the book series is a trilogy, this season stands alone — the first mystery is solved by the sixth episode — which I appreciate in this Age of Cancellations. But, if we do get more seasons and more mysteries, hopefully we’ll get to learn more about Cara. Every good teenage sleuth needs a queer best friend. And, maybe someday, more shows will let the sleuth herself be queer too.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is now streaming on Netflix.

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