YMMV / Marple

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The two actors playing Miss Marple have very different interpretations of her. Geraldine McEwan plays her as The Chessmaster while Julia McKenzie makes her something of a Genius Ditz.
• Complete Monster ("The Pale Horse"): Paul Osbourne started his criminal career at the age of 12, poisoning his stepfather and escaping justice by pretending to have been "cured" after a brief detainment. As an adult, Osbourne is the mastermind behind a shady organization centered in the titular inn. Unknown to his underlings, who lure the targets to the inn, he poisons toilet products with thallium sulphate, which ensures a slow and painful death. When Mrs. Davis, one of his pawns, starts connecting the dots about a list of ten deaths, Osbourne poisons her as well, then murders Father Gorman, the priest she has confessed her fears to. Once Miss Marple arrives to the inn, Osbourne poses as her helpful assistant to sway the investigation, killing another guest by tampering with his aphrodisiac and trying to frame Mr. Venables; he also tries to poison the protagonist before being exposed. When Marple reveals his crimes, he is smugly unrepentant and sneers at the old woman, until she also coldly dresses down his ego and incompetence, basically calling him ruthless to the point of Stupid Evil, requiring the police to retrain him from lunging at her in a violent rage. A Serial Killer motivated by "a greed for money and a propensity for wickedness", Osbourne stands out among the murderers in the series for his body count and the lack of redeeming factors.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • "A Pocketful of Rye" had the supposedly-plain Elaine Fortescue played by the decidedly beautiful Hattie Morahan, looking her best in fashionable clothes and an elaborate hairdo. Despite this, the other characters were at pains to point out how unattractive she was.
  • Another example in "Greenshaw's Folly"; the villains are a mother and son team, who keep their relationship absolutely secret to pull off a false heir scam. The mother is portrayed in the story as harsh, grumpy and late middle-aged, at least. In the adaptation, she's played by Julia Sawalha; she portrays the grumpy and sarcastic part well, but not only is she extremely attractive, she looks the same age, or even slightly younger, than the actor playing her son ^note  despite actually being in her mid-forties at the time!. On one hand, it certainly preserves the surprise, but on the other, it stretches Willing Suspension of Disbelief until it's ready to shatter.
• Retroactive Recognition: The episode based on Nemesis features early appearances of Dan Stevens (a few years before his breakout role in Downton Abbey) and Ruth Wilson (later known for Luther and His Dark Materials) in guest roles.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The series sparked a lot of controversies due to the liberal changes it makes to the original source material. Examples include inserting Miss Marple into adaptations of Christie's novels that did not originally include her (though others thought it a price worth paying for having them adapted at all), switching around the characters' personalities, and changing the murder motives and even the identity of the murderer. There was also a lot of inclusion of gay or lesbian characters, justified in interviews as being necessary to make the show 'modern' and 'relevant'. This argument annoyed some fans, who accept any Christie being a period piece as par for the course. Even some LGBTIA fans were annoyed at this - Christie created a great many Love Makes You Crazy villains, but in the adaptations a large proportion of them are implied to have gone this way at least partly due to being of 'deviant sexuality'.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The Murder at the Vicarage opens with a tracking shot that ends with showing a copy of The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler, before the murder plot unfolds. After the murderous lovers are executed, while Miss Marple prays for them at St Mary Mead church, a matching, reverse-order tracking shot closes the episode, beginning with showing a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely.

---