With the exception of the BBC series with Joan Hickson, film-makers struggle with Miss Marple. The point of Miss Marple, Agatha Christie's brilliant concept, was to make her a member of the most disregarded and voiceless species of human being - the elderly spinster. Persistently underestimated, she proves herself wiser than more worldly characters - the police of course, but also her annoying nephew Raymond West, various carers and others. She was genteel, polite, cultivated, gossipy, nosy, unprepossessing, feminine, politically incorrect, conservative and traditional. The only thing that marked her out was her understanding of human evil.
This series disregards all this. The essential 'Miss' is dropped in favour of the modern-sounding 'Marple'. She is quirky, not ordinary. It is hinted that she has had an affair, as if sexual experience was necessary to make someone a whole person. She is sophisticated, not provincial. Christie's Miss Marple would hardly have taken revelations of lesbianism in her stride; she was never unshockable and never approved of metropolitan ways. Presumably these character changes are to make her 'relevant' for modern audiences. Of course, the effect is to negate Christie's feat of imagination, by turning a remarkably unremarkable character into an unremarkably remarkable one. It undoes Christie's aim of reminding us that even very ordinary people can do wonderful things, and shows immense disrespect for a generation of people and a vanished way of life.
Fuss has been made about changing the ending of this and other novels. This is not the real crime of the makers - admittedly it takes hubris to tinker with Christie's logic but there is no reason not to challenge or tease the audience. The real crime was to kill Miss Marple and replace her with a Generation X view of what a little old lady should be like. Geraldine McEwan's Marple would have celebrated the Relief of Mafeking by drinking 10 Bacardi Breezers and getting her tits out in Trafalgar Square. The best production values in the world would not turn this travesty into anything worth watching