"From the creator of Broadchurch", an ad boasted, and my heart sank. When I nominated Seven Dials on Netflix as one of the 2026 shows I was looking forward to, I had no idea that the script-writer would be none other than Chris Chibnall, the inventor of The Timeless Child and the bane of Gallifrey.
I had a lot of problems with Chibnall's run as Doctor Who showrunner, which wasn't unexpected, as I didn't care for the Who episodes he penned during the reigns of his predecessors Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat either. Now, however, after RTD has botched his return to the show so badly, I've started wondering whether I judged Chibs too harshly. There were parts of his Doctor Who run I liked, such as the Flux series and The Power of the Doctor. Consequently, I was prepared to give his version of The Mystery of the Seven Dials (simply called Seven Dials on Netflix) a fair chance – or fairish at any rate.
In the end, Seven Dials turned out to be a solid good watch. Chibnall proved to be a better Christie adapter than Sarah Phelps, just as his Doctor Who run (with hindsight) can be said to be better than the RTD 2/Disney Plus era. The problem is, that's not saying an awful lot. I was grateful Chibnall didn't mess around more with the source material than he did, but there were still lots of moments when I had reason to recall why his Who scripts irritated me in the first place.
The basic plot is more or less the same as in Christie's novel, and her twists are intact. Chibnall has added one twist of his own, but I didn't think it detracted from the original story. Other tweaks of the plot were pardonable too. I don't quite understand why Bundle had to be in love with the first murder victim – it causes her to mooch around a great deal during the whole first episode – but I didn't mind it much. Gender-swapping Lord Caterham to an almost equally unlikeable Lady Caterham worked quite well, especially as she's played by Helena Bonham Carter. Mandatory diversity is built into the plot by making Ronnie Devereux of Indian descent and the brilliant researcher from Cameroon rather than Germany, but if we have to play the diversity game I much prefer these kinds of changes to "colour-blind" casting.
What is less easy to bear are the outbreaks of clumsy commentary, as if Chibnall just had to leave his 21th-century fingerprints everywhere. Sir Oswald Coote lunges into a Brash Capitalist rant about how class can be bought at one time, for no good reason that I can see. A whole scene is dedicated to showing how harsh Lady Coote has been to a maid. Lady Coote in the book was a good-natured creature who was bullied by the Caterhams' gardener, but I accept that making her sharper adds her to the roster of likely suspects, which is no bad thing. However, she doesn't have to turn into a servant terroriser. Lady Caterham's snobbishness is very on the nose, and the Cameroonian scientist makes a whole little speech about how he and others on the African continent had to fight at the behest of "European white men" which sounds a great deal more 2020s rather than 1920s.
It's not as if Chibnall has that good a grasp of the period he apparently feels superior to. When George Lomax laments the lack of political interest of young women, Bundle replies sweetly "gives us the vote and we just might [take an interest]", whereupon Lomax guffaws patronisingly. It's true that Bundle wouldn't have had the vote in 1925, but married women of 30 and over already had the right to vote since 1918, so the idea of extending this right further wouldn't have felt far-fetched even for Lomax. Lady Caterham tells Bundle that Bundle's brother died because of the mistakes of a "drunken old general". The High Command during World War One hasn't had the best press, but that is surely an oversimplified view of what went down. Officers trained in traditional warfare were ill-equipped to make tactical decisions in the first truly modern war; I would argue that their age and state of inebriation didn't have much to do with it.
But enough complaining. Chibnall may not be able to refrain completely from Chibnallisms, but compared to some of the pontificating we've had from other script-writers, and the right-out distortions of the source material we got from Phelps, they are simply mild annoyances. The best thing about this adaptation is not the script but the stellar casting. Mia McKenna-Bruce is spot-on as Bundle (though Chibnall should have given her a better grasp of grammar). Helena Bonham Carter is fun, as always. Martin Freeman makes a surprisingly convincing Battle, and his first confrontation with McKenna-Bruce's Bundle adds a welcome sparkle to the proceedings. Edward Bluemel is excellent as Jimmy Thesiger, and Alexander Macqueen is genuinely funny as Lomax. You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Mark Lewis Jones's Sir Oswald Coote, especially not if he was carrying his rifle and you were an aristo.
It's a shame that a few things are dragged out or added unnecessarily, while other aspects of the plot which were important in the book – Bill Eversleigh's feeling for Bundle, the efficiency of Pongo – get very little room. But all in all, this isn't a bad Seven Dials version. If Chibnall chooses to do a sequel of some kind (maybe adapting The Secret of Chimneys, though that would be reversing the original chronological order of the novels), I'm here for it.
