Hercule Poirot Was Born Perfect. So Why Is Everyone So Determined to Give Him an Origin Story?

Here is the thing about Hercule Poirot that the entire television industry seems to have temporarily forgotten. He does not have an arc. He never did. That is not a flaw in the character, it is the entire point of him. Poirot walks into every story already finished, the fussy little Belgian egg of a man with the waxed mustache and the insufferable certainty, the greatest detective alive from the moment he appears, and the drama is never about him becoming anything. The drama is the body in the library. So when BritBox drops a handsome first look at Edward Bluemel as a young, brooding, origin-story Poirot, my first reaction is not who is that. It is: why on earth does Poirot, of all the characters in the canon, need a backstory?

The news, briefly, is that the six-part series Hercule has begun filming in Liverpool, and we now have our first proper look at Bluemel in the role. He is a notably sleeker, moodier Poirot than we are used to, and the show promises an intimate study of the man alongside an epic portrait of Britain between the wars. It is, on paper, an origin story: how Poirot became Poirot.

The Sherlock-ification of Everyone

Let me tell you what is actually happening here, because it is a trend, and Poirot is just its latest and most telling victim. We are living through the great universe-ification of every standalone character we ever loved. Nobody is allowed to simply be a great detective anymore. They must have formative wounds, a supporting cast of confidants-in-waiting, a serialized origin, and above all a nemesis. And that last word is the tell. The synopsis makes a conspicuous point of teasing a single significant nemesis, and the BBC reportedly won this thing in a bidding war on the promise of up to three seasons. That is not a Poirot mystery. That is a Poirot cinematic universe.

The irony is delicious, because Poirot is the anti-Sherlock, and Sherlock is where this playbook comes from. Sherlock Holmes genuinely has the raw material for it, the addictions, the wounds, the Moriarty of it all, which is why the modern era has remade him young and hot and haunted a dozen times over. Poirot has none of that. Poirot has vanity, a devotion to symmetry, a mustache he loves more than most people, and an unshakable faith in his own little grey cells. He is a comic miniature, not a tortured soul. Trying to give that man a brooding origin and an arch-nemesis is like commissioning a gritty prequel about the early struggles of Mary Poppins. You can do it. But you may be sanding the joke off the one character who was funniest left exactly as he was.

And Yet, I Am Not Betting Against It

Now let me argue the other side, because I am not in the business of trashing a show that has not aired a single frame, and there are real reasons to keep the faith.

Start with the people making it. This comes from Mammoth Screen, the shop behind the excellent And Then There Were None, and its founding force previously shepherded the definitive David Suchet run that turned Poirot into a decade-plus institution. These are not tourists in Christie country. They have the deed to the house. And the “Britain between the wars” framing is genuinely promising, because that vanished, uneasy, class-riven interwar world is the actual soil Christie’s fiction grew out of, and treating it as an epic canvas rather than a cozy backdrop could give the whole thing real weight.

Then there is Bluemel, who is a shrewder bit of casting than the pretty first-look photo suggests. He has already spent time in the Christie universe, and a deliberately broodier, more melancholy Poirot is at least a real artistic swing rather than a lazy one. Every great screen Poirot was a gamble that sounded wrong on paper, from Ustinov’s twinkle to Suchet’s fastidious perfection to Branagh’s more recent habit of dragging the detective off to exotic locales to brood between corpses. Reinvention is the tradition here, not the betrayal of it. Maybe there is a version of young Poirot that deepens him without deflating him. I want to see somebody try.

The Particulars

For the planning-ahead crowd: Hercule is a six-episode series arriving in 2027, streaming on BritBox in North America and airing on the BBC in the UK. It draws on three of Christie’s early stories and is currently shooting in and around Liverpool. Bluemel leads a deep bench that includes James Nesbitt, Tamsin Greig, the reliably unsettling Jack Gleeson, and James D’Arcy. Benji Walters wrote it, with directing duties split across the six episodes between Jonny Campbell, Chanya Button, and Alrick Riley. If you want a companion piece on how thoroughly this young-and-handsome-classic-sleuth model has taken over, our look at the young Sherlock revival covers the other half of the trend.

The Verdict I Do Not Have Yet

So here is where I honestly land, contradictions and all. I think origin-ing Poirot is a slightly suspect idea, a solution to a problem the character never had, and I think the industry’s compulsion to turn every self-contained genius into a three-season franchise with a nemesis is one of the more tiring reflexes of the moment. And I will absolutely be watching every minute of it. Because the little grey cells earned my loyalty a long time ago, because Mammoth Screen has the receipts, and because I am dying to know who that nemesis turns out to be. Give me a Poirot worth the mustache and I will forgive almost anything, even a backstory he never asked for. The order, Monsieur Bluemel, is yours to restore.