'Towards Zero's Premiere Scores High in Anticipation

The world of Agatha Christie – spread over dozens of novels and decades of big and small screen adaptations – has such a distinct tonal and structural language that you can spend an entire hour inside one of her mysteries and only clock by the end that the inciting murder hasn't yet been committed. In fairness, this structural oddity is flagged in Towards Zero’s opening moments, where the experienced solicitor Mr. Treves (Clarke Peters) gives his take on murder mysteries around a stately dining table: they always start at the wrong place, the murder, when the killing is the inevitable destination for many twisted, overlapping stories of resentment and betrayal. It’s better to begin by tracing them to their point of origin.

As is now typical for literary adaptations on the BBC, Towards Zero grabs us with flashy style (read: solid, but over-directed and frantic craft) and tantalizing promises of scandal and intrigue. The first (of three) episodes arranges the plot in a way that, yes, builds anticipation for the middle and final act. However, the adaptation betrays Christie’s precise craft by embellishing every character beat with extreme, foreboding melodrama, to the point that we risk being exhausted before anyone ends up dead. 

It’s standard for mid-tier BBC miniseries at this point. To make a supersized impression, director Sam Yates (National Theatre Live’s VANYA) borrows camera and editing tricks from cinematic thrillers, which threatens to irritate more than Christie’s storytelling can entertain. Episode 1 brings us many promising beginnings, though.

Lady Camilla Tressilian (Anjelica Houston) is a bedbound widow at her coastal home of Gull’s Point, Devon. In the bay between her and a seaside hotel, many decadent young people have drowned in the deceptively strong rip currents. Her late husband had a ward, the playboy tennis star Neville Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, back playing another awful man after The Invisible Man and Bly Manor), embroiled in a nasty divorce case that’s become a public spectacle that could derail his career and cast him out from high society. 

His wife Audrey Strange (Ella Lily Hyland) claims he was unfaithful with the foxy socialite Kay Elliot (Sex Education’s Mimi Keene) – a fact Neville eventually admits on the witness stand to control his image: he may be a chauvinist, but he can be equally romantic and respectful with the women he loves and cheats on. It’s a soft version of the vitriolic and ugly PR crisis campaigns we see awful husbands spin in today’s gendered, sensationalized court trials.

Meanwhile, Lady Tressilian’s companion Mary (We Are Lady Parts’ Anjana Vasan) is slightly fed up of her duties to Camilla, and has secretly been penning love letters to Lord Tressilian’s nephew Thomas (Poldark’s Jack Farthing) who has spent over a decade working on a failing rubber plantation in Malay peninsula, Thailand after being exiled by the family. Mary invited him to attend Gull’s Point, of which Camilla will not approve. We learn later that Thomas made accusations against Neville’s family, and Mary is worried that this will derail her chances of a happy union with her pen pal. 

Audrey and Neville’s divorce may seem clean, but Neville is a cad through and through, and as soon as he’s married to Kay, his interest is piqued by the suave and newly independent Audrey. (There’s a fair bit of Neville being spurred to victory after catching the eye of women watching him from the Wimbledon stands, Challengers-style.) Neville decides to crash Audrey’s upcoming visit to Gull’s Point with his new, younger, more jealous wife. It’s not an ideal honeymoon, but Neville protests that he wants to show there’s no bad blood between him and his ex. Run for the hills, Kay. 

These five young lovers provide most of the dramatic fire, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of ancillary characters to keep things interesting elsewhere. The solemn, thuggish Arthur MacDonald (Adam Hugill) makes himself useful to Neville at his trial (well, he batters irritating reporters) and Neville agrees to hire him as his manservant. Surely he has no ulterior motives! Mr. Treves is also bringing a newcomer to Gull’s Point – his own ward Sylvia (Grace Doherty) has been expelled from a girl’s school for being a kleptomaniac, and he lodges her at the hotel while he sees to the Lady’s affairs. (Camilla says the next best thing to a husband is a lawyer, which indicates why many are put off by her personality.)

Sylvia’s wayward wanderings lead her towards the last remaining big-name actor in the series: Matthew Rhys (The Americans, Perry Mason) playing the depressed, alcoholic Inspector Leach. In Christie’s novel, Leach is the nephew of the author’s recurring detective character, Superintendent Battle, who has been excised for this adaptation. The previous telly adaptation of Towards Zero was part of ITV’s Marple series, where Battle was replaced with the iconic Miss Marple. This Battle guy can’t catch a break!*

(*Ed Note: In point of fact, Superintendent Battle is almost always excised from adaptations of the novels that feature him, which is why no one knows he exists, despite starring in as many novels as Tommy & Tuppence.)

Matthew Rhys has “the black dog” about him, according to Lady Tressilian – one of the nice details in episode one is that Leach refuses to address her with the inherently respectful language she expects, one of many signs that modernity is eroding all of England’s traditions and is too self-loathing to build bridges with the old order. 

After Sylvia is done pickpocketing at the hotel (where she eyes up a tempting ruby necklace), she wanders the cliffs and spots Leach standing worryingly close to the edge. Contemplating a case? We wish! He walks away, before rushing back and – she gasps! – falls to the watery rocks below. Even if no murder has befallen Gull’s Point by the end of the first hour, Towards Zero succeeds at painting (in brash, unmissable brushstrokes) a portrait of malaise and destruction. The only obvious interpretation is that a lethal storm is gathering, and will break at a moment’s notice.

Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero continues with new episodes released daily on Thursday, April 17, and the finale on Friday, April 18, 2025.