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David Suchet’s Poirot was a kind of super-intelligent, eccentric, cuddly penguin.

Whenever I am glum, or dispirited, or my brain won’t shut up so I can’t sleep, I put on the long-running British-made Hercule Poirot TV series starring David Suchet as the fussy Belgian detective. I have not read Agatha Christie, but I have seen every episode of the TV series at least thrice, and find it very comforting.

And why shouldn’t it be comforting? Suchet’s Poirot is hilarious in his extremely fastidious, meticulous OCD way. His sidekick Captain Hastings is the parody What-ho pip-pip Brit who seems to have wandered in from Jeeves and Wooster, who can be counted on to defuse tensions with an “I say” or “Good lord.” His secretary Miss Lemon created a badass filing system, had wonderfully complex hair waves, and chose to remain single. Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard constantly had doubts about the detective’s theories, but always saw the light of his brilliance in the end. We were allowed to laugh at Poirot’s quirks, because he always had the last laugh, and we could put up with his arrogance because he was always right. The grisly murders tended to take place in elegant houses full of rich, well-dressed people, and despite complications (and conveniences) all plot strands were neatly tied up in the end. Terrible things happened, but by the denouement the world seemed an orderly and benign place.

I don’t know if these portrayals were faithful to the Agatha Christie books, but I love that show, though in a different way from my love for, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (to be viewed in grim, difficult times when one feels surrounded by demons) or Seinfeld (always played in foreign hotel rooms to dispel any possible ghosts).

The only episode I don’t watch repeatedly is the series ender, because I don’t want to think of Poirot as mortal. Along with my friend Ricky, I’ve seen the film adaptations starring Albert Finney (too angry) and Peter Ustinov (not OC enough). I did not see the recent Kenneth Branagh movie until I was on a long flight, and found Branagh’s moustache ridiculous and the movie’s existence pointless.

John Malkovich’s Poirot is weary, dispirited, alone, and his brilliance is not of the “How did he know that!” sort. I clapped when I heard a piece of music that was also in Dangerous Liasons. Nerd.

In the new three-part series The A.B.C. Murders, Poirot is played by John Malkovich, and the world is not an orderly and benign place. The action is still set in the same period, the 1940s, but the mood is grim, foreigners are despised, and Poirot, a WWI refugee who has dwelt in London for two decades, is viewed with suspicion, derision, and disrespect. His arrogance has consequences. The first 15 minutes were hard for me to take, and then I realized that this is a Brexit-era adaptation and the opposite of comfort viewing.

The Suchet version of The A.B.C. Murders was one of the grayer, more depressing episodes of the old series, but compared to the new version it is Spongebob Squarepants. It hurt me to see Poirot doubted and insulted by Japp’s successor, played by Harry Potter sidekick Rupert Grint without a trace of Hogwartishness. The alleged serial killer is played by Eamon Farren from last year’s Twin Peaks, which I haven’t finished because it scared me, and he is properly creepy, as is Shirley Henderson as his landlady. The characters are less savory, sexual perversions are dealt with openly, and Poirot’s pre-migration history is futzed with, angering the legions of fans. Poirot refers to “vapid nostalgia for the gentle past”, which is pretty much how this series views the earlier series.

The reviews I’ve read range from unamused to furious. I find The A.B.C. Murders to be very good, disturbing, and superior to the other recent Agatha Christie TV adaptations And Then There Were None (too far out) and Ordeal by Innocence (too soap-operatic). I’m probably not going to watch it again, though, and it is certainly not for comfort viewing.