Agatha Christie's detective fiction is finally getting a modern-day English-language television adaptation. BritBox's upcoming series Tommy and Tuppence moves Christie's characters out of the mid-twentieth century and into the present, making it the first show of its kind in the English-speaking world.
According to Screen Rant, the series stars Josh Dylan as Tommy and Antonia Thomas as Tuppence, with Imelda Staunton in a supporting role as Ada, Tommy's experienced investigator aunt. The show's first season runs six episodes and will adapt three cases drawn from Christie's novels and short stories.
The premise reimagines the characters for contemporary London. Tommy is a bestselling crime novelist struggling with writer's block. Tuppence is a somewhat famous Hollywood actress who has recently returned to England. The two are exes who reconnect at a wedding, where they stumble onto their first murder case together.
Christie created Tommy and Tuppence in 1922, introducing them in the novel The Secret Adversary. Unlike her more famous detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, the Tommy and Tuppence characters evolved across stories, growing older and changing alongside Christie herself. That quality makes them particularly well suited to reinterpretation.
The show enters a small but growing category of modernized classic detective adaptations. The BBC's Sherlock translated Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian detective to present-day London and became one of the most globally watched British series of its era. More recently, Georges Simenon's mid-twentieth century Parisian investigator Jules Maigret was brought into the twenty-first century on PBS, with a second season premiering in October. Tommy and Tuppence represents Christie's entry into that conversation, with BritBox set to debut the series next month.
