I gave up on this mess when they we 1/4 way through and had introduced at least 8 new characters in a remote family castle that all could have been guilty. Screams coming from a detached house, etc., etc, I haven't read the Christie book, went to the 'net to find out at where this thing was going and discovered the only thing in common with the book was the title. Liked Hickson more as Miss Marple as well. This one presents as nothing so much as being an old busy body who needs to mind her own business.

It bemuses me that television writers believe they can 'improve' upon a story written by the best-selling author of the twentieth-century. Miss Marple did not appear in the original novel, so it was a bold stance to introduce her to this tale - that is perhaps the only way that the TV writer actually demonstrated some skill, by managing to inter-twine her among the other events. There is a truly excellent cast, floundering against a poor script, made especially bad by the necessity to introduce a character by the name of Evans. The original story is effectively mentioned in passing in a few of the key events from the original story, but that is as close this production gets to actually having anything to do with the real Christie story. In reality this is a new story by someone who just got so many elements wrong! I cannot classify this as 1 (awful) because the highly skilled actors do the best they can to pull off a reasonable performance, but this is not a good production. Julia McKenzie tried very hard but she just did not appear anything like the Miss Marple that Dame Agatha created, perhaps because her part was created by a television writer not the late, great mistress of crime fiction. 2 and a half out of 10 is the best I could give to this effort.

After watching this inaccurate, insipid film, I've completely given up on these new Agatha Christie adaptions. "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" was not originally a Miss Marple mystery, and in countless other ways has been altered so drastically that it's hardly recognizable as the same story.I understand that when transforming a novel to TV or film, characters, times, places and events need to be altered, collapsed, edited, etc. for the sake of time and pacing and so on. Fine, we all get that. But it seems as though "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" hasn't been altered for any logistical reasons; it's so far from the novel (which, by the way, is delightful) that they may as well have gotten rid of the last ties to the original plot and just called it a 'new' Agatha Christie mystery. It was successfully done with the Gershwins (in the form of "Crazy For You," calling it a 'new' Gershwin musical). However abysmal those new stories might be, it would probably infuriate infinitely fewer people if they just wrote new stories instead of destroying classics.

Like her predecessor Geraldine McEwan, the new Miss Marple, Julia McKenzie, has a great deal to overcome. The main issue is the skewed adaptation of Agatha Christie's original. While I do love Christie and Miss Marple, I'm actually getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this series. Yes, it's NOT Miss Marple to the word, and "Evans" never was a Marple Story. I read the book a few months ago and in my opinion, that book wasn't one of Christie's best. It's not a biggie with me that they've placed Miss Marple in it or they've made changes to the story. I simply enjoy watching mysteries made in England and set in other time periods. There's murder without buckets of blood and tons of gore on the screen, like we get here in the states. They murder each other while being beautifully dressed and serving tea and scones. Miss Marple cuts below the facade and gets her man.....or woman. She does't drop a stitch either. All in a day's work.