binapiraeus

I loved the first season that reunited us with our old friends Humphrey and Martha, spoiled us with beautiful shots from the Devon coast, and also introduced a stunning new narrative technique where the detectives 'join' the criminals in the reconstruction of the crimes. The regulars are lovable, the crimes are intriguing, the backstory is touching, and there's a lot of fun on the side as well - good to see that amidst all that bleak drama the TV channels foist on us there's still a place for some good old-fashioned escapism which we all need these days. May it lasf as long as the original Death in Paradise!

After the adaptation of "Ordeal by Innocence" earlier this year, we thought things couldn't get any worse concerning the on-screen rape of Agatha Christie's novels - but, since Sarah Phelps was AGAIN commissioned to write the screenplay for a new adaptation of Dame Agatha's classic "The ABC Murders", we could have guessed... Portentous, pathetic, perverted from beginning to end - and believe it or not, even boring as well! Half of the goings-on were never in the book, least of all the gloomy flashbacks into Poirot's war experiences back in Belgium; the actors are unbelievably bad, the atmosphere is dreary, dark and seedy (in other words, just about everything Agatha's novels never were) - is that supposed to be holiday entertainment?? For HOW LONG is the BBC going to keep allowing Sarah Phelps to violate Agatha Christie's novels and ruin their viewers' Christmas holidays??

I've been an Agatha Christie fanatic ever since I was a teenager; I've watched all the adaptations I've ever come across, most are great, both movies and TV series. But, in contrast to recent very impressive movie adaptations, the quality of the TV dramas the BBC makes out of Agatha's classic seems to be in a steady decline. It's understandable that scriptwriters are desperately looking for some way to make the stories who are well-known to millions of fans look different, 'new' in some way - but this is in NO way an excuse for literally RAPING a classic murder mystery, as has been done in this case. Let alone the fact that a crisp and clever whodunit has been turned into a 'modern' TV drama, gloomy and bleak, with absolutely no character in it that you could describe as halfway sympathetic, the people who are responsible for this script actually went so far as to CHANGE the identity of the murderer! Which, of course, leads to the fact that nothing really goes together anymore, because Agatha didn't just write her stories like that - every little detail fits in. So, absolutely nothing fits in here at the end, because a different ending is superimposed on a story that had been very carefully worked out - not even the title works anymore, because the word 'innocence' isn't supposed to refer to whom we think throughout most of the book. It's high time the BBC stopped treating the work of the Queen of Crime in this way; millions of fans will be put off, and it's highly unfair to young viewers who aren't very familiar with Agatha's oeuvre - they might think that she actually WROTE trash like this.