A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Netflix

While further renewal may have seemed a sure thing, one of Netflix’s best shows of the year has hit a snag in its second season, despite how successful the first was.

While season 1 of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder topped the Netflix charts for a solid week after its debut, season 2 has arrived and is doing very, very poorly, arriving at #9 and after almost a week, barely creeping up one slot to #8. And seemingly through no fault of its own. Now, season 3 is in jeopardy, the series being co-produced by BBC and Netflix.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder increased its critic score season-over-season from 83% to 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. But what’s extremely notable is a huge jump in audience score from 68% to 95%, one of Netflix’s best of the year, in fact. It may be a record for this year, actually, or close to it.

• It did seem like things were working in the show’s favor even outside of these scores, such as:
• Star Emma Meyers, who has amassed a fanbase after her role in Netflix’s most popular series, Wednesday.
• Four full books of source material from author Holly Jackson, meaning two more seasons would have storylines laid out.
• What has to be a relatively low cost, given that it’s not some blockbuster project nor full of high-priced A-listers.

There are limits, however, to how badly a show can underperform, and hitting marks that are so drastically different from season 1, with barely any signs of improvement as time goes on, is concerning. The other metric is how many people stick around to watch a series until the end of a season, indicating the likelihood of return for another greenlit season. We don’t have access to that data; only Netflix does.

A saving grace here may be that the series is co-produced by Netflix and the BBC, which could lead to a more complicated path to renewal than straight streaming viewership that we’re seeing here. Netflix has co-produced series with many other outlets in the past, but that does not make them immune from cancelation, of course.

I’m reminded of an example from a long time ago, one of Netflix’s most baffling decisions. That would be the cancellation of The Baby-Sitter’s Club, an obviously low-cost series with two 100% critic scores across both its seasons. But the key was viewership, and it simply didn’t have enough. We see plenty of good series canceled all the time because of this, even if the show isn’t breaking the budget, and it seems that A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is on the verge of falling victim to that practice.

From here, it’s not as if luck will turn things around on the list, at least. There aren't really any major series taking up space here, and unless things improve, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder will likely fall off the list entirely. Some of this viewership drop could be attributed to the just-under two-year gap between seasons. While that’s not all that different than average these days, it seems like a show like this with pre-made source material and just six episodes should not have taken this long to return. A gap closer to a year probably would have helped. Now it needs some luck and grace for a season 3.

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