There’s a bit of a mantra I’ve seen TV showrunners use when promoting their shows: What they’ve made isn’t a TV show, it’s a multi-episode movie. It’s the kind of comment that tends to make TV critics sigh heavily — whatever their intentions might be, they seem to be suggesting that what they’ve made is somehow better than the lesser art of television.
But the idea also serves to chip away at what makes TV such an interesting form of media on its own: Given multiple episodes, you have so much more time to get to know characters and see their choices and narratives unfold. Such complexity might have helped the new Netflix adaptation of Richard Osman’s best-selling novel “The Thursday Murder Club” (out, naturally, on Thursday).
The novel and film both introduce us to the titular group of aging club members, who all live at an upscale retirement community called Cooper’s Chase. The group’s ringleader, Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), has a collection of cold case files that she and her compatriots Ron (Pierce Brosnan), a former rabble rousing labor leader, and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), a former psychiatrist, investigate together. When they realize they need a bit of medical expertise about the mysterious death they’re investigating, they pull in Joyce (Celia Imrie), a retired nurse.
Inevitably, a new murder transpires in their peaceful community, and the club springs into action to solve it, with some assists from an ambitious and undervalued junior police officer, Donna (Naomi Ackie).
In book form, the group’s charms unfold as they investigate (though both novel and film fail to convince that the men are much use in the process), and their younger compatriots consistently underestimate them. Here, they’re introduced with such haste that characterization becomes something to barrel through rather than grow with any subtlety.
For instance, in the book, Mirren’s Elizabeth is coy about her background; she clearly had some kind of intelligence career, but she never divulges details. In the movie, she bluntly tells Donna that the car she’s driving is a retirement gift from MI6. Well, that settles that. When Joyce makes a comment she disapproves of, she snarks back, “Have you ever had to interrogate an enemy spy in former East Germany, Joyce?” Seems like the kind of thing you’d want to keep to yourself!
Mirren, who’s well cast despite the brute-force plotting, gets stuck with a number of clunkers about age. “It may be old, but it still works,” she tells a police officer who points out the age of her smartphone.
The central mystery that unfolds at Cooper’s Chase also suffers from abbreviation. David Tennant is on hand and at his most weaselly as a shady local developer, Ian Ventham, whose actions cause various plot elements to move forward, but he’s underused. Though you may enjoy hearing how the various actors pronounce his name (Mirren is a plummy Vent-um, while others give it a softer Venth-um). And a subplot about Ron’s aging boxer son Jason (Tom Ellis) getting implicated in a murder fizzles, while one of the book’s biggest reveals is turned into an excuse for hammy villainy from a surprise performer whose work is usually far more enjoyable.
It’s a shame. The book is quite fun, and they’ve assembled a dynamite cast, but there’s too much lost here in the effort to cram it into a two-hour movie. If only they’d turned it into a miniseries.
Lisa Weidenfeld is an arts editor at the Globe.
Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at lisa.weidenfeld@globe.com. Follow her on X @LisaWeidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.