Ordeal by Innocence

Agatha Christie's country house murders are always hokum, but they can make for easy and entertaining Sunday-evening television. But this adaptation of 'Ordeal By Innocence' doesn't seem to work at all. One problem such adaptations always have is fitting in the huge quantity of exposition needed to explain the convoluted plotting; another is the typical absence of sympathtic characters, given the normal premise that just about everyone is a potential murderer. Often, these problems are solved via the use of a (usaully amateur) detective as the focal point; in this story, there is none, and the reveal occurs via a complex (and sometimes baffling) sequence of flashbacks that are shown to the viewer apropos of nothing. You really can't deal with this sort of material by trying to pretend that it's something less contrived than it is; attempting to do so produces less a mystery, than a mess.