Stream It Or Skip It?

It’s been literally 50 years since Agatha Christie‘s death; she passed on January 12, 1976. But it’s been amazing that in the half-century since her death, her novels continue to be adapted into TV shows and movies. Sometimes those adaptations take some liberties, but others are faithful to Christie’s structure and style. The new Netflix series Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials feels more like the latter.

Opening Shot: Looking out from behind the face of a large clock, we see a town square. “RONDA, 1920.” A man traverses the cobblestone streets of the Spanish town, and goes to a rendezvous point inside a bullring. Instead of meeting someone, though, a bull charges him and gores him to death. As he lies in the dirt, bleeding out, a card with a clock on it lies next to him.

The Gist:  “CHIMNEYS, 1925.” Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is watching a masquerade party being thrown at the mansion she shares with her mother, Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter). Caterham, very much not into the social aspect of the aristocray, is renting out her estate to Sir Oswald Coote (Mark Lewis Jones) and his wife, Lady Maria Coote (Dorothy Atkinson) for the party, with a number of guests lodging there for the night.

One of the guests is Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), who works in the Foreign Office with Ronny Deveraux (Nabhaan Rizwan) and Billy Eversleigh (Hughie O’Donnell). They want to prank the heavy-sleeping Gerry by setting off eight alarm clocks in his room the next morning. But Bundle wants to see Gerry for other reasons; the two are sweet on each other, and Gerry wants to ask her an important question the next day.

But that next morning, when the alarms go off, Tredwell (Guy Siner), the head butler, finds Gerry dead in his bed, an empty bottle of sleeping draft next to him. Bundle runs up to find out what’s going on and she sees the body, and something curious: Seven clocks placed carefully on the mantle.

As word of Gerry’s death filters through the estate, including their friend Jimmy Thesiger (Edward Bluemel), Bundle tries to hold her grief, even going with her mother to the grave marker for her father and brother; her brother died in WWI, with Gerry doing a lot to save his fellow soldiers and pull her brother’s body off the battlefield. When she finally lets go, she bashes to piees the desk in the room where he was found, where she finds a letter to Gerry’s sister talking about “Seven Dials.” She also finds the eighth clock used in the prank out in the garden.

She’s convinced that Gerry was murdered, but the coronor’s inquest says it was “death by misadventure.” She gets even more suspicious when a man who’s following her (Martin Freeman, playing Superintendent Battle) goes to a phone box; she goes in after he leaves and finds he had just dialed Scotland Yard.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Adapted by Chris Chibnall from Christie’s novel The Seven Dials Mystery, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is reminiscent of another recent Christie adaptation, Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero.

Our Take: We mention Towards Zero because it was a rare Christie adaptation that didn’t have a murder occur for its entire first hour, and dragged because of it. We don’t have that to worry about in Seven Dials, as we get two suspicious deaths within the show’s first fifteen minutes. But the story is mostly about Bundle Brent, who will be assisted by her loving but grouchy mother and the slippery Superintendent Battle to figure out exactly what happened to Gerry and whoever else happens to meet their demise along the way.

This is much more of a traditional take on a Christie mystery (FYI, Seven Dials isn’t the first Christie book to take place at Chimneys, but Chibnall wisely doesn’t assume viewers know that), but here the main detective is the young, feisty, determined Bundle. All of what she is can be seen in the masquerade party scene; even though she’s firmly a member of the aristocracy, she’s also a young woman in the liberated 1920s, someone who’s not afraid to take charge and cast doubt on what the older men in her life are telling her.

It’ll be fun to see Carter’s crusty Lady Caterham get involved in the investigation as she sees her daughter dig up more information. In fact, the combination of Carter, Freeman and McKenna-Bruce should make for some interesting chemistry as they look into these deaths.

Performance Worth Watching: Mia McKenna-Bruce is fun to watch as Bundle. She’s has “it,” as Billy tells Ronny, but that “it factor” also makes her one of Christie’s youngest and fiestiest detectives.

Sex And Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Bundle encounters someone she knows lying hurt in the road; as the person dies in her arms, these words are uttered: “Tell Jimmy Thesiger… Seven… Dials.”

Sleeper Star: Who doesn’t like watching Helena Bonham Carter be her usual HBC self as the mostly over-it Lady Caterham?

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find. Most Christie adaptations are pretty well-written, and also ones like Seven Dials, that are only 3 episodes, don’t leave a lot of room for superfluous scenes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is a well-paced, traditional Christie adaptation with a fun-to-watch young protagonist at its center, which is rare in the world of the classic mystery novelist’s stories.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.