Three Pines and Thinking You're Too Cool For Cozy

In abandoning the cozy aspects of its source material Three Pines becomes plain boring

It’s hard to know where to start when thinking about how to describe watching Three Pines, Amazon’s new mystery series based on Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books.

On one hand I want to get into the tedious weeds as to the many discrepancies I found with how the powers that be decided to change the characters, content, and settings from the books, but I also don’t want to be a complete adaptation nazi about it because I do understand that changing aspects of books for movies or television is always required.

I think it’s more than possible to change around aspects of a book to create the same effect the book had on readers through a different medium and in turn bring to life everything readers enjoyed about the books and more. It is possible to have a good book series turned into a television series that takes on new perspectives into the characters! We don’t have to recreate the wheel of a piece of art to make good television! We don’t have to continue this divide as a country. And if you’ll just vote for me this November…

Wow, sorry. Very offtrack.

At its simplest the Inspector Gamache series of books are cozy mysteries with quirky characters that take place in a modern day fairy tale village that happens to be in Quebec and happens to take place in our contemporary time period. There is no intense connection to violent crime pulled straight from the headlines. It is not a series devoted to understanding the causes of crime and all that contribute to it. It is not a series based on hard nosed detective or policing work. It’s charm and popularity come from this unique setting Penny created with memorable side characters who inhabit the village, and a compelling and compassionate detective.

Three Pines the television series ignores the importance of this charming non-realistic setting, in effect disrespects all the townspeople side characters by making them all weirdo suspects, and then completely throws out the window the other worldly feeling Penny is so good at crafting through eighteen novels because the allure of “relevant” storylines calls to loudly. All while portraying really stereotypical backwoods Quebecois caricatures, miscasting most of our beloved characters, and spurning Penny’s unique style of writing mysteries that are not plot or clue dependent but ways of exploring human character. And not surprisingly by doing these things what we’re left with is a show with boring mysteries, flat characters, and a lack of any charm.

The filming though beautiful at times, never really reaches the point where we feel as if we’re at home within the village itself. For the producers of a show called Three Pines to not realize that the most important character of the show is indeed Three Pines is a glaring error. We don’t get enough time in the bistro, we don’t see inside Clara’s house, and the town square is just lacklustre. I need it to be more Stars Hollow and less every-small-town-in-Canada. The decision to make the command centre in the art studio didn’t make sense because that could have been a perfect opportunity to bring the centre of the town into focus and a great excuse to film more scenes in the town square and make it feel more of a village. More attention should have been given to designing the bistro and simply more time spent filming there. These are basic problems and if you can’t get these right I’m going to be a lot more critical on how badly the casting and writing turned out.

Aside from Alfred Molina who, although I would prefer him to have some slight accent, is a very well cast Gamache, the entire casting is pretty bad. The decision to make Beauvoir a deadbeat, unlikeable, and lower ranked detective was not helped by the acting abilities of the worst Sutherland in acting.

I will probably never forgive the casting of my favourite character Myrna as a young, thin, annoying person. Myrna is written as a confident, wise, hilarious, larger black woman. She’s always the best side character in every book. I cannot forgive this. I will say that the character of Ruth is probably the most well cast in comparison with the books and I think in part because the actress is willing to go over the top with her. What’s missing from all the characters of this series is the understanding that these stories are inherently over the top and non-realistic. We love these characters because we wish they would exist, not because we know their replicas in real life.

And even though I am not Quebecois or French Canadian in one little bit, the way they allowed the character of Agent Nichol to be played really is just offensive and bad.

But the biggest change made between books and screen is the terrible decision to make the people of Three Pines into weirdo suspects that we the viewer are always questioning in every episode. This could have been the perfect opportunity to correct the mistakes made by Penny in the first books and create coherent, likeable, and complex secondary characters from the beginning. Instead the tv show leans into Penny’s insecurities and strange ideas she had in the first four or five novels. We want to like the people of the village so that we will want to spend time there! We don’t care about the loosely strung together mysteries if we get to keep coming back to check in on Gabri and Olivier in the bistro!

Obviously the writers wanted to make this series less Midsomer Murders and more The Wire because they inserted the entire season long storyline about missing Indigenous women which is nowhere present in the book series. I don’t have any problems with the storyline itself, even though it did feel lazy at times, but it does make a clear divide into how the show runners want this series to feel. By not making the mysteries simply episodic they are opting out of the very successful cozy mystery genre. Death in Paradise is still one of the highest rated shows on BBC and it’s in something like its eleventh season. There’s a reason why people want to watch shows like this, because they create a world apart from reality where we experience answers and conclusions to mystery, crime, and disorder. We want to be able to experience in just one hour the small semblance of justice, restoration, and completion that we know we just can’t experience in real life.

One of the reasons I keep reading Louise Penny novels is that it fulfills this promise to provide a diverting mystery, time to spend with characters I’ve come to know over the years, and a sense of completion and restoration when Gamache discovers the murderer by the end of the book. To me, when I think about the Inspector Gamache books I can think of no better source material for a new cozy mystery tv series that I would enjoy coming back to watch year after year. Cozy mysteries may not be flashy, gritty or realistic, but they are entertaining and surprisingly rare in our vast amount of streamable tv. Cozy doesn’t have to be boring which is why Louise Penny has found huge success in her series of books, unfortunately for Three Pines the Amazon producers decided to abandon it.