Something peculiar is happening to Agatha Christie on British television. The Queen of Crime, whose novels have sold more than two billion copies worldwide – second only to the Bible and Shakespeare, as the author herself might have noted with dry amusement – is being systematically dismantled and reassembled by a generation of showrunners who seem far more interested in her blind spots than her certainties. The country house mystery, that most dependable of British entertainment formats, is being inflected with feminist rage, folk-horror unease, and protagonists who would never have passed muster at a 1930s dinner party. The result is a run of adaptations that are as much about now as then.
The most visible evidence arrived in January 2026: Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a three-part Netflix series adapted by Chris Chibnall, the Broadchurch creator, and starring Mia McKenna-Bruce as Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent, a 19-year-old aristocrat who solves a murder that Christie’s 1929 novel eventually lets a male detective claim credit for. It premiered to a 73 per cent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, though audiences were cooler at 51 per cent. Either way, it is the most recent proof that the Christie adaptation boom is not slowing down – it is getting stranger, darker, and more politically alert.
Bundle Unchained
Chibnall described The Seven Dials Mystery to NPR as “a neglected banger” when he first encountered it through Netflix. The novel features Superintendent Battle and a cast of stately-home eccentrics, but its most memorable creation is Bundle – whipsmart, independently minded, and, in Christie’s original, ultimately sidelined at the climax. Chibnall told Town & Country that the non-negotiable change was giving Bundle full agency: “It would’ve been the least satisfying final episode in history of television if we knocked her out halfway through episode three. She had to have agency. It’s her story from start, from first moment to last moment. She had to be the one making the discoveries, figuring it out, confronting the people responsible.”
This is not a cosmetic adjustment. In Christie’s novel, Bundle’s role as amateur detective is largely curtailed in the final act, with the men around her stepping in to wrap up the case. Chibnall’s rewrite restores her authorial control, and in doing so he touches on something that scholars of Christie have long debated: the extent to which her female characters are genuinely autonomous, or merely performing autonomy within a patriarchal framework that the novels ultimately reinforce. By making Bundle the sole architect of the solution, Seven Dials argues that Christie always intended her to be the hero – the novel simply hadn’t caught up.
The gender-swap of Lord Caterham into Helena Bonham Carter’s Lady Caterham adds another layer. As Chibnall explained to Town & Country, the change reframes the story as one about two generations of women: the mother, retreating into grief and the crumbling estate after the First World War, and the daughter, refusing to be defined by loss. “It’s a story about despair and loss, and are you going into the future front-footed like Bundle, or are you anchored, weighed down by the past?”
Phelps and the Gothic Turn
If Chibnall’s approach is warm and energetic, Sarah Phelps – the screenwriter behind the BBC’s most ambitious Christie run – leans into darkness. Phelps has adapted five Christie novels for the BBC since 2015, beginning with And Then There Were None, which Tim Martin in The Daily Telegraph praised for presenting “an isolated mansion full of leaking corpses, in which the characters – quite understandably – freaked out in ways that no previous adaptation has countenanced.” Her version of The ABC Murders (2018) starred John Malkovich as a Poirot beset by racial prejudice and institutional decay. Her Pale Horse (2020) wandered into witchcraft and the occult.
In May 2025, the BBC and BritBox International announced that Phelps would adapt Endless Night, Christie’s 1967 novel about a working-class man who marries an heiress and builds a dream house on cursed land. The source material is already one of Christie’s most genre-fluid works – part love story, part ghost story, part psychological thriller – and Phelps’s track record suggests she will not sand down the horror elements. “One of Agatha Christie’s last novels, this is a chilling story of love, sex, deceit and death, of how far we’ll go to get our hearts’ desire and what we’ll do when night falls and the wolves start circling,” Phelps said in the BBC’s announcement.
Phelps’s Christie is not cosy crime. Her adaptations locate the social violence lurking inside the golden-age drawing room: class warfare, sexual hypocrisy, the complicity of empire. Where earlier BBC adaptations – the Joan Hickson Miss Marple, the David Suchet Poirot – treated Christie’s world as a nostalgic diorama, Phelps treats it as a crime scene that happens to have very good wallpaper.
The Outsider Arrives
The outsider protagonist is now a structural convention of modern Christie adaptations. In Murder Is Easy (BBC One, December 2023), the Nigerian diplomat Luke Fitzwilliam, played by David Jonsson, replaced Christie’s white British gentleman-detective, transposing questions of race and belonging into a 1950s English village where everyone assumes the deaths are accidents. The Guardian’s review noted that the adaptation “tackles race, feminism and class, while still being quintessentially English.” It drew 6.82 million viewers for its first episode, competitive with ITV’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? in the same period.
Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall took a different kind of outsider approach with Seven Dials, relocating the action to a precise September day in 1925 – “just to emphasise the characters are in the shadow of both the first world war, which obviously has had a generational effect on all the characters and particularly the men. And then also, it’s in the shadow of the Spanish flu, which ravaged Europe after the first world war.” He told NPR that he wanted to avoid “Planet Agatha Christie,” where adaptations “take place on a sort of ‘1930-something’ in an English village.” Instead, he treated Christie as “a social diarist of the time she’s writing in.”
This contextualisation is itself a feminist and postcolonial act: it refuses to let Christie’s England remain a safe, apolitical space, and insists that the class, gender, and racial hierarchies her characters inhabit are not decorative but constitutive of the mystery.
The Pipeline
The pipeline is staggering. Beyond Seven Dials and Endless Night, the BBC has Hercule in production – a Poirot reboot starring Edward Bluemel, with casting announced in May 2026. BritBox is launching a six-part Tommy & Tuppence with Antonia Thomas, Josh Dylan, and Imelda Staunton in September 2025. Meanwhile, 20th Century Studios confirmed in October 2024 that it is developing three films: Miss Marple, And Then There Were None, and Witness for the Prosecution. Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot films have already established a template for the prestige Christie cinema adaptation, though A Haunting in Venice (2023) pushed hardest into supernatural territory, drawing on the gothic atmosphere of Hallowe’en Party.
What unites these projects is a refusal to treat Christie as a museum piece. The adaptations compete on darkening: each successive version is grittier, more psychologically complex, more willing to interrogate the assumptions embedded in the original texts. This is not always successful – Towards Zero (BBC, 2025), starring Anjelica Huston and Matthew Rhys, earned a strong 74 per cent from critics but only 37 per cent from audiences, and the iNews critic Gerard Gilbert noted that “too often the BBC tries to make its Christie series dark and relevant” when the material might be better served by balance. But even the failures are instructive: they reveal where contemporary sensibilities chafe against the conventions of the golden age.
Why Christie Endures
Christie’s work lends itself to reinterpretation because its surfaces are so deceptively simple. The plots are clockwork; the characters are types who conceal depths; the settings are both specific and archetypal. When Chibnall told NPR that Christie is “slightly underrated” despite selling two billion books, he was pointing to something real: her reputation as a plotter has masked her abilities as a social observer. The new adaptations are recovering that second dimension.
The feminist dimension is particularly striking because Christie herself was, in many ways, a proto-feminist figure. She was the first British woman to surf standing up – a fact Chibnall cited as inspiration for Bundle – and her life, from her 1926 disappearance to her fifty-year marriage to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, was one of radical independence. The new adaptations do not invent a feminist Christie; they return to the one who was there all along, buried under the cosiness of successive genteel productions.
The folk-horror inflection – Phelps’s gothic atmospherics, Branagh’s Venice séances, the cursed house of Endless Night – reflects a broader cultural appetite for stories where the past refuses to stay buried. In an era of reckonings with empire, with inherited wealth, with the lies nations tell themselves, Christie’s country houses have become haunted houses. The mystery is no longer whodunit but what was done, and by whom, and at what cost to the living.
Agatha Christie wrote 66 detective novels and over 150 short stories. She died in 1976. Nearly fifty years later, television is still excavating her – and finding things she left there on purpose.
