A12| Thursday, March 12, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
WHEN MILLIERobinson visited
England as a teen in the 1970s she
was exposed to a world of British
television that had yet to make it
to PBS programming at home. For
years after, she had a hard time
getting her hands on many of the
low-key murder mysteries and
quirky comedies from the U.K.
Today, her problem isn’t gaining
access to British TV shows, it’s fig-
uring out which ones to watch.
“If I sit there and browse,” she
says, “I could browse all day long
and have no idea if this one is
worth it or not.”
The streaming era has brought
more British TV shows and movies
to audiences across the Atlantic
than ever before and created a
golden age for fans of the murder
mystery. At the same time, this
rapidly expanding content often
jumps from platform to platform,
making it difficult for fans to keep
track—and spawning niche ser-
vices designed to help them.
Now, classics like “Agatha Chris-
tie’s Poirot” and “Vera,” both from
ITV, are all available for bingeing,
as well as recent hits like the
BBC’s “Death In Paradise,” about a
British detective who goes to work
in the Caribbean. On Friday, Ama-
zon Prime Video releases limited
series “The Pale Horse,” the third
BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie
novels the service has premiered
exclusively in the U.S. The run
over the past three years includes
“An Ordeal by Innocence,” starring
British actor Bill Nighy, and “The
ABC Murders,” with John Malk-
ovich as Hercule Poirot.
While one-stop streaming ser-
vices like Prime Video, Netflix and
Hulu offer hundreds of British TV
shows and movies, much smaller
services have emerged to super-serve fans. BritBox, a British-centric
streaming service jointly owned by
BBC Studios and ITV, recently said
it had more than a million custom-
ers in North America. A big part of
its strategy is to snatch up BBC and
ITV shows when their contracts ex-
pire with services like Netflix, says
Soumya Sriraman, president and
CEO of BritBox, North America.
When the service acquired “Death
In Paradise” recently, it became one
of its most popular shows.
American fans say they’re
drawn to British shows for thescenery and the emphasis on char-
acters, often with intelligence and
humor (and, of course, those ac-
cents). Ms. Robinson, a 62-year-old
retiree who lives in Shallotte, N.C.,
says she appreciates the casting of
relatable and often older actors.
“If they have bad teeth, they have
bad teeth,” she says. “And if there’s
a woman who’s not particularly at-
tractive, they don’t try to glamorize
her. She looks like just what she
looks like. It doesn’t look like Botox
and cheek implants have taken over.
They look like real people.”Britbox competitor Acorn TV,
owned by AMC Networks, offers
programming that General Man-
ager Matthew Graham describes as
“British and beyond,” including
shows made around the world that
share the sensibilities of British
TV. Acorn TV, which also says it
has more than a million subscrib-
ers in the U.S., on March 23 makes
its first theatrical release available
on the service, “Miss Fisher and
the Crypt of Tears,” based on the
popular Australian TV show, “Miss
FROM LEFT: BRITBOX; PRIME VIDEO; ITV/EVERETT COLLECTION Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.”
H
ercule Poirot, the beloved Bel-
gian detective, is at once ubiq-
uitous and hard to pin down. This
is partly because of the messy
ownership of each of the 13 sea-
sons of the ITV series “Agatha
Christie’s Poirot.” Here’s how to
find the classic series starringDavid Suchet, and other recent
portrayals of the dapper detective.
BritBox:Offers the first six seasons
of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” as well as
the final, 13th season. But it’s not
listed as season 13—instead as
“Poirot’s Final Cases.”
Acorn TV:Here you can find seasons
seven and eight.Rentals:Seasons nine through 12 aren’t
on a U.S. streaming service, but available
to rent through outlets like Amazon.
Amazon Prime Video:Last year
released the BBC’s “The ABC Murders,”
with John Malkovich as the detective.
At the movies:“Death on the Nile,”
starring Kenneth Branagh as Poirot,
comes to theaters Oct. 9.Where to Find Poirot?
LIFE & ARTS
Readers Find Comfort in
Pandemic Books (Really)
Five titles to help you lean into your coronavirus fears
Stefanie Hutson, the creator of
iheartbritishtv.com, a website that
provides a guide to where to find
British shows streaming in the
U.S., says the niche services com-
pete by getting the rights to popu-
lar shows fans want to see and
simply by making it easy for them
to find what they’re looking for.
The 39-year-old says she started
the site in 2016 to help her grand-
mother find good shows.
Now the site averages roughly
200,000 pageviews a month, has a
Facebook community of more than
20,000 and an email list of 10,000,
says Ms. Hutson, who has mone-
tized the site by selling ads, affiliate
links and products such as a “Brit-
ish Mystery Variety Puzzle Book.”
According to data provided to her
by Facebook, she says, 95% of her
group is made up of women and the
vast majority are 45 and older.
With the release of the “The
Pale Horse” in the U.S. comes a de-
bate from across the pond over
how the series differs from the
original Agatha Christie novel.
When it was released in the U.K.,
fans took to social media to air
sometimes scathing criticism.
Sarah Phelps, the British TV vet-
eran who adapted “The Pale
Horse”—among other Agatha Chris-
tie titles—for television says she
didn’t grow up reading the famed
novelist or watching adaptations of
her work and wasn’t aware of the
power of the fan base. But she de-
fends her approach.
“If you try and write to make
people happy who believe they are
the arbiters of what is a good Ag-
atha Christie,” she says, “you’re
not going to make anybody else
happy and you’re not going to be
writing what is your own true re-
sponse or what you believe the
book’s about or what you believe
the writer herself is trying to say.”BYCHRISKORNELISgist and author who studies fear. “It
might be easier to grapple with ter-
rifying zombies to remind ourselves,
‘OK, that’s not going to happen.’”
Here, a sampling of popular ti-
tles that flirt with our fears:‘World War Z’ by Max Brooks
The Chinese government tries to
cover up a mysterious disease that
is detected by a doctor examining
a bite mark on a boy’s foot. By the
time the nature of the problem
emerges—an outbreak of the living
dead—it is too late. Chaos ensues.
The 2006 novel looks at the
threat of apathy and misinformation
and the point when initial denial
tips over into public panic. “I didn’t
have to make that up—that happens
in every plague,” said Mr. Brooks.
The author, now a nonresident se-
nior fellow at the modern war insti-tute at West Point, based the novel
on the 2002 SARS outbreak. It tells
a cautionary tale about what hap-
pens when governments fail their
public health systems. “I based my
zombie novel on SARS with the op-
timistic assumption that hopefully
we have learned our lesson,” Mr.
Brooks said, “and clearly we ha-
ven’t.”‘Station Eleven’ by Emily
St. John Mandel
Bolstered by buzz around the au-
thor’s new book out later thistled wherever they could, clustered
close together for safety in truck
stops and former restaurants and
old motels.”‘The Stand’ by Stephen King
In the story, a strain of flu devel-
oped for biological warfare is re-
leased in an accident at a secret
laboratory. A man escapes the
scene. He coughs. It’s not long be-
fore soldiers in gas masks are toss-
ing the dead into Boston Harbor
with pitchforks.
The novel might be spookiest
when describing the silent spread
of a catastrophic contagion cheer-
fully nicknamed “Captain Trips.”
Everyday life continues among
people as good as dead. “Sarah
Bradford and Angela Dupray
walked back to their parked cars
together (infecting four or five
people they met on the street),”
Mr. King writes, “Sarah went home
to infect her husband and his five
poker buddies and her teenaged
daughter, Samantha....The next day
Samantha would go on to infect
everybody in the swimming pool at
the Polliston YWCA. And so on.”‘Wanderers’ by Chuck Wendig
A bat-based sickness spreads
across the United States in a presi-
dential election year, evoking the
current coronavirus that likely
started with a bat. Victims with
the fictional “White Mask” illness
grow white fungus on their faces.
They develop Alzheimer’s-like
symptoms that strain a society un-
equipped to handle a population
losing its grip on reality. The 2019
book has been optioned for TV.
“Fiction is always that cool
thing where you try to wind up
three real things so you can make
up the fourth thing,” said Mr.
Wendig. He loaded his White Mask
with metaphor. “This is also about
politics, social media and the
spread of white supremacy. I
wanted it to have an intellectual
function at play in terms of how
we deal with memory and how we
process information.”‘The Hot Zone’ by Richard
Preston
In recent weeks, readers have
reached out to Mr. Preston on In-
stagram about his two books on
the deadly Ebola virus: “The Hot
Zone,” a 1994 nonfiction thriller
chronicling the first emergence of
the disease and efforts to halt its
spread, and “Crisis in the Red
Zone,” which traces the deadliest
ever Ebola epidemic from 2013 and- In those books he studied
not just the effects of the disease
but the ways in which it made peo-
ple feel less human, leading them
to turn their backs on victims
bleeding to death in hopes of sav-
ing themselves.
The books are in their own way
reassuring, Mr. Preston said, since
they describe an ultimate victory
over Ebola. “Human struggle, sus-
pense, fear, sacrifice, a battle with
a nonhuman enemy and ultimate
survival—these things make a
story that speaks to people right
now,” he said.
month, sales are strong for the
2014 novel about the fictitious
Georgia flu. The disease starts with
a random attack on an actor on
stage and soon spirals out of con-
trol. Emergency rooms are full and
hospital staffers are too sick to
work. Civilization collapses within
two weeks.
“There was the flu that ex-
ploded like a neutron bomb over
the surface of the earth and the
shock of the collapse that fol-
lowed,” Ms. Mandel writes, “the
first unspeakable years when ev-
eryone was traveling, before every-
one caught on that there was no
place they could walk to where life
continued as it had before and set-SOCIAL MEDIAis chattering
about Stephen King’s “The Stand,”
a novel revolving around a weap-
onized flu that kills almost all hu-
mans and animals on the planet.
Although it came out in 1978, sales
of the trade paperback were up
25% in the first eight weeks of
2020, while purchases of the hard-
cover more than tripled, according
to NPD BookScan.
So many readers were trying to
draw parallels between the book
and the current outbreak that Mr.
King took to Twitter to debunk the
idea. “No, coronavirus is NOT like
THE STAND,” he wrote. “It’s not
anywhere near as serious. It’s emi-
nently survivable. Keep calm and
take all reasonable precautions.”
Want to see inner angst in the
Age of Corona? Look at how peo-
ple are “relaxing” as they chase
down the 2011 movie “Contagion”
and buy up books on viral out-
breaks, looking for psychic predic-
tions in past work while steeping
themselves in dread.
Nothing represents society’s ills
quite like a pandemic. Trade pa-
perback sales of several well-
known novels about outbreaks rose
in the first eight weeks of
2020 compared with the
same period in 2019, ac-
cording to NPD. Sales of
Max Brooks’s “World War
Z,” for example, rose 33%,
while Emily St. John Man-
del’s “Station Eleven”
spiked 50%. Print sales of
adult nonfiction about con-
tagious disease as a cate-
gory were up 52%.
Some readers are so in-
trigued by books on deadly
viruses, they’re chasing ti-
tles that aren’t even in
print anymore—like Dean
Koontz’s 1981 novel “The
Eyes of Darkness,” which
mentions a fictional virus
called “Wuhan-400” from
the same part of China
where the current coronavi-
rus started. The author’s
agent, Richard S. Pine, says
any connection to the cur-
rent outbreak is misguided.
“I’ve spoken with Dean
about ‘The Eyes of Darkness’ on a
number of occasions and can assure
you that he doesn’t consider it a
pandemic novel,” said Mr. Pine. Wu-
han-400 only makes a brief appear-
ance at the end of the book, he said,
noting that the book is mostly about
a mother who goes on a quest after
thinking she sees her dead child.
Readers are even digging up
classics, like Mary Shelley’s “The
Last Man,” an 1826 novel about a
runaway plague. Around the
world, she wrote, “each human be-
ing inhales death” as a late 21st-
century epidemic scorches through
society, “gifted with a virulence
before unfelt.”
Americans consuming outbreak
entertainment are a little like dis-
ease rubberneckers seeking to reas-
sure themselves from a safe dis-
tance. “It’s like practicing being
afraid,” said Margie Kerr, a sociolo-BYELLENGAMERMANU.K. series find U.S. fans: Brenda Blethyn in ‘Vera,’ Rufus Sewell in ‘The Pale Horse,’ David Suchet in ‘Agatha Christie’s Poirot’The British Are Coming—to Your TV Streaming Menu