17 Jun Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games (2009-2024)

Origami still in the paper

(Comment on two-thirds of a long series.)

I’ve watched all of the first season, and most of the second. So you don’t have to, these are TV episodes for a French audience that are well produced with the charms peculiar to a lowbrow and moderately engaging time filler.

The first season is set in the 30s so at least the decor and class system is more or less apt. The assistant investigator is a smart gay man.

The second edition has a completely different set of actors, three times as many episodes and set in a James Bond-styles 50s. The dynamic is more from Perry Mason’s Della Street. We have a Marilyn Monroe style blond as the secretary, a spunky redhead as the newspaper reporter who gets in peril. And from time to time sexual interests of different kinds. I’m told the third edition is set in the 70s.

It is advertised as Agatha Christie mysteries, and most have plot elements from her mysteries in their adaptation. But this is more Hardy Boys and Rockford Files than Agatha. The differences are interesting. People can amuse themselves as they wish, so I can’t say anything about the suitability of these.

But the form is notable. What you read in a Christie story is a sequence of events, usually from two perspectives: what has happened in a carefully balanced charade that hides ‘evil’ intent and action, and then in story-time what our detective sees on our behalf. These two are in some balance; What Poirot understands until the end is more opaque than Marple.

Then at the end, usually in a third resounding by Poirot to the assembled suspects is what really happened. We find that most of the suspects really were guilty of something unexpected and the overlap of happenstance created the false narrative of what we originally understood.

What makes her stories is not what happened or what characters we encounter, but how the narrative shifts are constructed. These ‘adaptations’ have a few of the former and none of the latter.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

IMDB