Matthew Rhys' talent is wasted in the mystery miniseries Towards Zero

Matthew Rhys is an expert at appearing miserable on the screen. He skillfully maneuvers looking burdened and evokes empathy while doing so, whether it’s playing a KGB spy in The Americans or a defense lawyer during the Great Depression in Perry Mason. This endearing quality makes him perfectly suited to play a depressed detective in Towards Zero. In the British miniseries, Rhys tackles a traumatized veteran who’s in charge of solving murders in a coastal town. The show is also populated with talented actors like Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Mimi Keene, Anjana Vasan, Jackie Clune, Clarke Peters, Jack Farthing, and the indomitable Anjelica Huston. It’s just too bad that their performances are the only fun part of this Agatha Christie adaptation. 

Writer Rachel Bennette and director Sam Yates take one of the famous mystery author’s less-appreciated books and turn it into a three-part drama that demands patience and the will to stay awake, especially in its premiere. But Towards Zero‘s slow-burn start isn’t really the issue—and neither is the fact that no one dies until well into the show’s second episode. It’s that the scripts, frankly, are dull, and the storytelling is borderline incoherent, making the wait for something—anything—to happen feel interminable. The show opens with a line about how good detective stories start at the wrong place—the murder—when they should begin at the point zero, when the idea for the crime was born. And in trying to tediously embody this idea, Towards Zero falls flat. 

However, this is still a Christie joint, so the pace picks up once TZ introduces a plethora of other characters, each uniquely motivated to kill. Everyone is visiting the aristocratic mansion of Lady Camilla Tressilian (Huston) when a summer holiday goes wrong and the house’s owner is found beaten to death on her bed. The suspects range from her overworked maid to a sneaky valet to, most importantly, the popular tennis player Neville Strange (Jackson-Cohen). Neville, a former ward of Camilla’s deceased husband, recently went through a very public, very contentious divorce with Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland). Camilla kept tabs on the scandal through the newspapers and didn’t approve of Neville later marrying the “wildcat” and “Venus fly trap” Kay Elliott (Keene). 

Camilla Tressilian also rightfully wasn’t a fan of the trio choosing to spend the same damn week at her place. (Audrey visits because she was raised there as an orphan, and Neville and Kay are there as part of their honeymoon for some reason.) Lady Tressilian feared that tensions would be high during their stay—and boy, was she right. Camilla’s death under her own roof gives Towards Zero the sense of action that it needs, even if the show’s payoff is predictable as hell.