No more Poirot?

    Having grown up reading Agatha Christie, I am very sad, that the day has come where the last Poirot show will air. Poirot was many things, as such I lack the words to explain him that will impress on you a profound admiration for the man. The people at The New York Times thankfully, do not suffer this malady and have written an eloquent article on this. Read the full article here.
   
     Many actors attempted to portray Hercule Poirot, but only David Suchet gave it life.
 
     Christie’s character, protagonist of more than 30 novels and many short stories spanning the two world wars, was a bit thin on the page — he was no Holmes or Maigret — and Mr. Suchet and the “Poirot” writers beefed him up over the years, giving him layers of wit and understated emotion. He may have been vain and imperious, but on screen he was far from the “egocentric little creep” (Christie’s words) who wore on his own creator.

From left, Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran), Inspector Japp (Philip Jackson), Hercule Poirot (Mr. Suchet) and Captain Hastings (Hugh Fraser) will reunite on “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” Credit ITV Studios for Masterpiece
         

      Mr. Suchet’s portrayal was, in the classic British tradition, built from the outside in. Christie provided a template — short and fastidious, with a dramatic mustache and an egg-shaped head. To this Mr. Suchet added a stiff, military posture and a slightly mincing penguin’s waddle of a walk that could turn into a surprisingly nimble run on the rare occasions when action was called for. Add a small assortment of expressions — gimlet stare, disapproving frown, twinkling grin — and across roughly 80 hours of screen time a full portrait emerges of pride, loyalty, fastidiousness, kindness and implacable principle.

      Mr. Suchet’s wise and warm performance was the through line in a series of varying quality. Some episodes felt padded; others, showing the strain of squishing a novel’s worth of Christie’s clues and red herrings into 50 or 90 minutes, were mystifyingly incoherent. Famous guest stars often did little beyond contribute to the show’s gallery of hilariously bad continental accents.

       The end of “Poirot” is most notably the end of Mr. Suchet’s long-running performance, but it’s also a step closer to the end of the type of self-contained, plot-based, cloud-of-suspects mystery popularized by Christie and not so long ago predominant in television crime dramas. The last pure example in American TV was probably “Monk,” though the flag is carried by the Holmes shows (“Elementary” and “Sherlock”), and perhaps someone will eventually revive Christie’s Miss Marple. Most of the territory has been ceded to serialized dramas that can’t maintain multiple suspects over a season-long run and instead pick them up and dismiss them one at a time while the detectives mumble and agonize.

        The makers of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” were no doubt conscious of the antiquated nature of their endeavor, and this season they had some fun with it. An exasperated suspect, tired of being politely browbeaten by Poirot, yells: “Why do you insist on referring to yourself in the third person? It’s intensely irritating.”

         “Because,” the detective replies, “it helps Poirot achieve a healthy distance from his genius.” A lot of American viewers may find that an intensely irritating answer, but some of us will find American TV poorer without Poirot.