Ever since Netflix first teamed up with Rian Johnson to help him make Knives Out, it's been easy to forget that it ever makes any other mysteries and whodunnits. After all, the Daniel Craig-fronted movie series is so brilliant and so popular that it has a way of stealing the limelight more than a little.
Agatha Christie's Seven Dials makes sure to put the name of its most famous creator front and centre, since this is a big-budget adaptation of a novel from the writer many consider to be the best ever in her genre, bar none. It'll tell one of her most classic tales, all set in the idyllic English countryside.
Unlike some of her more famous detectives, from Mrs Marple to Poirot, this one has a more unassuming sleuth at its heart – Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent, played by Mia McKenna-Bruce. That could prove to be a fairly masterful bit of casting, with McKenna-Bruce something of a rising star in the British film world right now.
She's far from the only interesting name in the cast, though, with giants like Martin Freeman and Helena Bonham-Carter also holding down key roles, and it looks likely to be a very fun, twisty story of pranks turned serious. That's the hook, here – a prank gone wrong that leads to a grisly murder, with no clear culprit in sight.
This is all interesting to those of us in the UK, too, because it seems to put the BBC squarely in Netflix's sights. The Beeb has made a habit in recent years of putting out miniseries adaptations of Christie stories around Christmas as great comfort viewing, and that presumably is the slice of pie Netflix wants to steal.
That said, this series comes on 15 January, so it's aiming more for the New Year energy, with people trying to banish the post-Christmas blues, and it could be perfect for that.
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