Continuing my entanglement with the Criminal Element, I parse two very different British TV crime miniseries: Ordeal by Innocence and Bodyguard.
“A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects—sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels (Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any unreliable narrator. This story of a badly behaved rich family eating its own spawned an all-star 1985 film adaptation and a 2007 TV version. Now, the BBC has been releasing a series of high-gloss, new Christie productions for the telly, the latest being the three-part return visit with the Argyll family’s various demons now airing on Amazon Prime… “
See the rest of this review — and a lot of other good stuff — here.
“At some point, a disturbing notion has to cross the mind of anyone who’s been assigned a bodyguard: who protects me from my protector? If that bodyguard decides he doesn’t like what he learns about his charge, it’s inevitable that he’ll ask himself, why should I protect this person?
“These questions and more underlie Bodyguard, a BBC prestige production that was a huge hit in its home country and has now come to America’s shores on Netflix…”