Agatha Christie Meets Knives Out In The BBC's Huge 164-Episode Detective Franchise

Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb Published Aug 22, 2026, 5:05 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. Sign in to your ScreenRant account Fans of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries who yearn for more of the character comedy found in the Knives Out movies should check out the BBC’s unmissable and incredibly long-running detective show. There is no shortage of murder mystery shows on television and streaming, from grim psychological thrillers like Mindhunter and True Detective to cozy classics like Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder. The genre runs the gamut in terms of style and tone, but the queen of the murder mystery remains undisputed despite this. Although Columbo’s absent-minded sleuth is the greatest TV detective of all time, it is Poirot’s creator Agatha Christie who wrote the greatest novels in the genre’s history. As well as creating the inimitable Belgian detective Hercule Poirot himself, Christie also penned the equally influential Miss Marple novels, as well as many standalone mystery books. Her darkest effort, 1939’s And Then There Were None, was a massive influence on the Giallo and slasher genres, proving that her work was successful enough to shape horror movies and crime writing alike. One aspect of Christie’s writing that many of her imitators tried and struggled to recapture was the author’s knack for colorful character comedy. Many of Christie’s suspects were instantly recognizable caricatures, and the Knives Out franchise took this approach and amplified it even further to create some of the funniest murder mystery movies in years. Viewers who enjoy director Rian Johnson’s puzzle box mysteries could do worse than to seek out Death in Paradise, a long-running BBC mystery show set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie. Death In Paradise Is A Huge Franchise You Won't Finish Quickly Debuting way back in 2011, back when the grisly CSI franchise was dominating the murder mystery genre on the small screen, Death in Paradise offered viewers a far cozier vision of crime investigation. The show follows a British police officer who is sent to the island to solve a murder and, when he manages to find the unlikely culprit, is reassigned there permanently to investigate the unlikely number of homicides that plague this seemingly idyllic getaway. Like the sleepy English countryside county of Midsomer in Midsomer Murders or the corpse-riddled small seaside town of Cabbot Cove in Murder She Wrote, Death in Paradise’s island of Saint Marie is positively lousy with murders. The sheer number of killings on the island makes The White Lotus’s titular resort chain look safe, but this ensures that there is always another case for the show’s rotating cast of cynical detectives to investigate. Death In Paradise's Real Stars Are Its Locations Without giving away any undue spoilers, suffice to say that more than one fish-out-of-water detective ends up playing the protagonist role across the 14 seasons of Death in Paradise, as the show replaces its main character not once, but twice in its 164 episodes. This is without even getting into the many spinoffs that extend the world of the franchise even further. Death in Paradise’s first spinoff, Beyond Paradise, started in 2023, and its second spinoff series Return to Paradise debuted a year later. Beyond Paradise is set in Devon and manages to make the English county look just as beautiful as Death in Paradise’s real-life filming location of Guadeloupe. In both cases, the settings of the series are an intrinsic element of their appeal. Much like darker detective dramas like True Detective or Sharp Objects wouldn’t work half as well without their sweaty Southern settings, Death in Paradise and Beyond Paradise benefit from their beautiful, albeit very different, locations. By setting an Agatha Christie-inspired whodunit full of characters straight out of a Knives Out movie in a place that looks like Heaven on Earth, Death in Paradise gets endless mileage out of the contrast between its idyllic location and its dark murder mystery story. Release Date October 25, 2011 Creator(s) Robert Thorogood