‘Masterpiece’ sticks with the familiar

“Masterpiece” continues its 50th anniversary with a nod to old favorites. The revival of “All Creatures Great and Small” on “Masterpiece” (9 p.m. Sunday, PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) has been generally well received and welcomed by many as a tonic for troubled times.

“Masterpiece” also launches “Miss Scarlet and the Duke” (8 p.m. Sunday, TV-PG, check local listings), featuring many familiar themes, settings and faces. Kate Phillips (“Wolf Hall”) stars as a fetching Victorian-era woman who takes to detective work with the help of Detective Inspector William “The Duke” Wellington (Stuart Martin, “Jamestown”).

Her father is played by Kevin Doyle, best known as the long-faced and long-suffering valet-turnedfootman Molesley from “Downton Abbey.”

While not broadcast under the “Masterpiece” imprimatur, “Inside the Mind of Agatha Christie” (10 p.m., TV-14, check local listings) offers a personal and literary profile of the prolific novelist behind such “Masterpiece” mystery staples as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

“Mind” also has a “Downton” connection. It’s narrated by Samantha Bond, who played Lady Rosamund on that series. “Mind” includes interviews with Christie’s grandchildren as well as her literary executors. We’re shown an extensive library of notebooks where the plots to her many novels were hatched, often written in cryptic code and arranged and revised until she achieved the desired narrative flow.

We learn of her work as a nurse during World War I, when she learned the grim details of bullet wounds and exit wounds, the psychic toll of enduring artillery barrages and, perhaps most important, the finite and granular difference between administering medicine and delivering poison. All of these dark details would show up in her novels.

As her fame grew in the mid-1920s, a painful divorce and a brief, headline-generating “disappearance” jolted her from claiming to be a wife who incidentally wrote novels to becoming a serious author.

Biographers and filmmakers involved in Christie adaptations take a defensive stance against literary snobs who dismissed her works as mere entertainments, set in a “chocolate box” world and confined to “tea cosy” plots and drawing-room mysteries. They cite her genius for observation and the exactitude with which she dropped a breadcrumb trail of details. “Mind” also explores the real-life events behind novels like “Murder on the Orient Express,” her cold-blooded dissection of liars and lying in “Witness for the Prosecution,” and the relentless and quite sadistic dispatch of characters in “And Then There Were None.”

We’re told more than once that she remains the best-selling novelist of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. As someone who worked in book publishing, I would have liked to see a nod to the rise of paperback books as contributing to Christie’s popularity. Or conversely, the popularity of Christie’s books as a factor in the rise of the paperback, a publishing phenomenon that democratized the book world. Christie’s “entertainments” turned millions into readers.

› Streaming on Netflix, starting on Saturday, “Radium Girls” stars Joey King (“Fargo,” “The Act,” “The Kissing Booth). Produced in 2018 and not screened in theaters until 2020, the film had a very limited release. The period piece follows the tragic history of women in the early part of the 20th century who worked in watch factories and were slowly poisoned by the radium used to illuminate the dials.

Also new to Netflix, the 2016 fantasy “A Monster Calls” concerns a boy (Lewis MacDougall) with a dying mother, who is entranced by an enchanted yew tree. The international production also stars Sigourney Weaver, Liam Neeson and Felicity Jones.