Guiding light
While Poppy Cogan was busy adapting Holly Jackson novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder for television, the book became a worldwide sensation. She explains how she brought this mystery drama to the screen and reflects on her own journey to creating her first TV series.
In the past five years, Holly Jackson’s young-adult (YA) novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has sold more than seven million copies worldwide, spawned two sequels and a prequel novella and become a global word-of-mouth sensation on TikTok.
It’s a phenomenon screenwriter Poppy Cogan (Red Rose, Chloe) knows all too well, having watched the book become a bestselling hit at the same time as she was writing a six-part adaptation for the BBC.
“We had to leave out a lot, and one of the biggest challenges is knowing what to leave out from the book because there was a lot more material there,” Cogan tells DQ. “Because we’ve got this huge fan base who are almost evangelical about it, there’s also such an emotional connection with [main characters] Pip and Ravi and Holly Jackson that there was a huge pressure, wanting to make them happy but also trying to make the best TV show you could and trying to bring in new audiences.
“We wanted to add some more emotional stories that build out the family a bit and the friendship group, and in that case, you have to lose more story. It was always just an almost impossible balance of trying to find that sweet spot in the middle.”
Debuting last month on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer, the series follows smart and single-minded Pip (played by Wednesday star Emma Myers), who takes it upon herself to investigate the disappearance of schoolgirl Andie, who went missing five years ago. The police believe she was killed by her boyfriend, Sal, but Pip isn’t so sure and is determined to clear Sal’s name, enlisting the help of Sal’s brother Ravi (Zain Iqbal) along the way.
Cogan was aware of Jackson’s novel, as her children had read the book. And when she was approached by producer Moonage Pictures’ Florence Walker with a view to adapting it for television, she immediately found it had a number of ingredients needed to make a successful transition to the screen.
“You have Pip, who is very distinct, tenacious… she’s really proactive, so that’s great for any story when you’ve got a character who just goes after something,” Cogan explains. “But she also embodies all the themes you’re wanting to explore in the show. What is a good girl? Is there such a thing as a good person or a bad person, or we all just a mixture of both? She embodies that in her journey, and she can carry the plot but also the emotional story, and both feed off each other. That’s really important.
“The other thing you look for is a world you can visualise, and I could just see Little Kilton [the story’s setting] immediately and how that would appeal to a YA audience. You could just kind of see the show.”
Early in development, it was key for Cogan – who has previously featured in the DQ100 – to map out how Pip would embark on solving the riddle behind Andie’s murder. But it was also important that every twist and turn in the plot would inform Pip’s own emotional arc and that of her friends and neighbours who become key suspects or witnesses in her investigation.
“Pip starts as this real good girl and a little bit sanctimonious. She needs to obviously go on a big old journey and the case needs to inform that,” the writer says. “But the plot is first and foremost, it’s got to be, and we were lucky because Holly is really good at the surprising twisty plots, so we didn’t have to do a lot. The biggest challenge was knowing what to leave out and then making sure it still really worked.”
The adaptation process was made trickier by the fact Jackson’s novel contains transcripts of Pip’s interviews with various characters she quizzes about the events surrounding Andie’s murder, as well as visual elements such as Post-it notes and maps. Cogan had to find a way to lift those flourishes off the page, not least by turning an entire section of Pip’s bedroom into an evidence wall.
Then there was the question of why people would agree to speak to Pip about the case. “In the book, because it’s YA, you just accept immediately that she’s interviewing these people and that they would be fine to be interviewed, particularly people like Max Hastings [a person of interest played by Henry Ashton],” Cogan notes. “So we had to build in barriers all the time, and some of them were quite light, like he makes her drink shots [before he answers any questions]. But we needed to understand that it’s not that easy to go around a small town interviewing people about a painful event.”
Many characters could be said to be humouring Pip’s work in the beginning, offering her some cryptic answers and leaving her to continue solving the puzzle. But others completely open up to her as the weight of years-old secrets and lies begins to take its toll.
“There were lots of great emotional stories to get into, and what appealed to me about the book in the first place was the ability to get a real teen show,” Cogan says. “I’m an old-timer, really. I’m nearly 50 and I grew up with a lot of American TV shows. I just loved the energy of them and the escapism of them. The television I love is often about escaping, just transporting you into a world that’s slightly better than the world we’re all inhabiting now.
“This was a perfect summer in a perfect town, and there’s a dark underbelly. Dolly Wells, the director, really got that as well and brought that to life, so we’ve got the sweetness and nostalgia of a teen show combined with a propulsive crime show. As a writer, that’s a really fun task.”
RELATED CONTENT
DQ100 2023/24 – Part three
In the third part of the DQ100 2023/24, DQ picks out a range of shows to tune in for and the actors, directors and writers making them, as well as some of the trends and trailblazers worth catching up with.
Living for the ‘Gram
In psychological thriller Chloe, a young woman infiltrates the life of a social media star to find out how she died. Creator Alice Seabright, executive producer Tally Garner and the cast speak to DQ about making the series.
Working on Wednesday
Hair and make-up designer Tara McDonald discusses her Bafta- and Emmy-nominated work on Netflix’s supernatural mystery Wednesday, in which she sought to create modern looks for its cast of iconic characters.
Cogan describes herself as an “odd case” in her profession, having come to screenwriting later in life after she “just couldn’t work out how to make any money out of it” in her 20s. “It’s almost impossible,” she adds. “How do you get into screenwriting?”
In Cogan’s case, she began working in advertising before becoming a mother at 27. Then when her baby was napping, she would sit down and write. One project called The Fold became a 2013 feature film. On the back of that, she secured an agent, who encouraged her to write a TV pilot for the type of show she would want to watch – something “a bit funny, a bit dark.”
The resulting project was picked up by a production company before sitting in development for several years. Though it didn’t get made, the script caught the attention of the industry and secured Cogan some meetings, leading her to become a writer on 2022 BBC YA horror series Red Rose. She has since worked on another BBC drama, Chloe, and was also part of the writing team behind Paramount+ drama Dangerous Liaisons and upcoming Prime Video series Haven.
“That was my journey,” she says. “I think it’s quite an unusual one because lots of people come up through theatre or soaps, but I just jumped in at a certain point, and I think I was lucky with timing as well. I started writing 20 years ago. My baby is 20. It sounds easy, but it was not.”
Pitched as Midsomer Murders meets Veronica Mars, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is Cogan’s first original series to land on screen. At first, it was going to be an hourlong series, but then when it was greenlit by the BBC, Cogan was told it would instead comprise six 45-minute episodes. That meant the story had to be shrunk further, while Cogan and her co-writers – Ruby Thomas, Zia Ahmed and Ajoke Ibironke (who wrote one episode each) – also had to condense some characters.
“We had all read the book forensically. We’d watched some other things we felt were similar – Booksmart, Veronica Mars and Twin Peaks, which is my old seminal text – and then we went into the writers room and just broke the series into episodes,” Cogan says.
They determined that each one would be based around a set piece, from an elaborate garden party to a camping trip, while they also needed to end with a hook. “Then we brought Holly in, and she was hugely involved with it from that point on in terms of both giving notes on the scripts and casting,” she continues.
“The other thing that happened while we were writing is the books exploded. When we started, it was quite small, but it’s just been growing and growing while we’ve been working on it, which has added a strange element because suddenly you’re getting feedback on what people love about it.”
Cogan and the team had to keep the book’s fandom at a distance, however. “We couldn’t let it inform us too much,” she says. “What we’ve done is we’ve really captured the spirit of the books, which is this fun, intense ride, and the character of Pip. Then we’ve made a teen detective show out of it. I hope people like it.”
Rising star Myers was cast in the lead following her breakout role in Netflix smash hit Wednesday, and Cogan would often join her and the rest of the cast on set in the idyllic town of Axbridge, Somerset, which was transformed into Little Kilton.
“It was a lovely summer, it was a magical time,” Cogan says of production, which took place last year. “Dolly just created this lovely set with these young people. I’d go down there and they’d all be hanging outside the pub and lying in the sun. It was like a holiday camp.
“We’d written in these places, like the swimming hole where they go camping and stuff like that. I know people think it’s an Americanism, but I love the British countryside. It’s beautiful and magical, and I just wanted to bring a little bit of that into this show.”
Cogan was also an exec producer on the show, which is produced by Moonage and distributed by BBC Studios. Germany’s ZDFNeo is a coproducer on the series, which will also debut on Netflix on August 1.
“It was my first show, so I kept a respectful distance because I was there to learn as well,” the writer says, though she was heavily involved in scouting locations and watched audition tapes for the extended cast – from Ashton and newcomer Iqbal to Raiko Gohara (Zach), Asha Banks (Cara), Jude Morgan-Collie (Connor), Yali Topol Margalith (Lauren), Yasmin Al-Khudhairi (Naomi) and Carla Woodcock (Becca). Additional cast members include Anna Maxwell-Martin, Gary Beadle and Mathew Baynton.
The show’s opening scenes proved to be particularly challenging for Cogan, as the inciting incident behind the whole plot – Andie’s disappearance – happened five years before the story takes place. Several versions of the script began with a 12-year-old Pip, but it was felt that would have lowered the show’s age too much.
“We needed to show the audience that we were going to go dark. By the end, you’re in the world of date rape, racism and serious stuff, but we also couldn’t really show a murder because it’s a complicated thing. You can’t show that she’s dead because maybe she’s not,” she says.
The decision was then made to follow an injured Andie walking through town in a “cinematic, silent” way that raises plenty of questions about what has happened, while also establishing the environment the show is set in.
Across the series, Pip faces numerous hurdles as she attempts to discover Andie’s fate. Yet in the Pip’s search for the truth, Cogan says the series aims to explore what the character – the titular ‘good girl’ – is willing to sacrifice along the way.
“Obviously she sacrifices being a good girl,” the writer says, noting the crimes Pip commits in her pursuit. “She’s justifying herself all the time that she’s doing the right thing, and then the moment of crisis for her comes when she sees the police interview with Sal and suddenly thinks, ‘Oh my God, what if I’ve got all this wrong?’
“I wanted Pip to understand that she might be a little bit self-righteous at the beginning but, by the end, she understands that there’s nuance and grey areas, and there are people who are a little bit of both [good and bad], and she’s one of them. In the further books, and if we go on to make further seasons, she goes on an even bigger journey.”
tagged in: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, BBC, BBC Studios, Florence Walker, Moonage Pictures, Netflix, Poppy Cogan, ZDFneo