Where Netflix’s new ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ adaptation fits in rise of ‘cosy crime’ media

Enter the sleuths

At the heart of Osman’s story are four retirees — sharp-as-a-tack former intelligence agent Elizabeth, Ron, the ex-trade union firebrand with a soft spot for football and a talent for disruption, Ibrahim, a psychiatrist who prefers logic to emotions, and Joyce, a former nurse, whose dithery and slightly nosy diary entries anchor much of the narrative with warmth and wit.

Osman’s central premise is disarmingly simple: that life after retirement doesn’t mean irrelevance. His characters are sharp, messy, grieving, flirtatious, and resourceful. Their appeal lies in their ordinariness, made extraordinary only in their refusal to disappear quietly.

There’s something radical about making four septuagenarians the beating heart of a narrative, as fully realised protagonists and not as comic relief or embodiments of tragic decline. The Thursday Murder Club not only gives its characters a second act, it argues they never stopped being centre-stage.

Netflix’s adaptation, directed by Chris Columbus, leans into the story’s warmth, its meditations on aging, grief, loneliness, and purpose, while retaining its dry wit and deft plotting, and the essential chemistry between the four friends.

A nice cosy crime

What’s cosy about crime? It’s not merely the absence of gore — the violence is mostly at a polite removal — but a tonal alchemy: small communities, amateur detectives, a moral universe where justice is ultimately served.

In the world of cosy crime, intelligence is not the preserve of tortured geniuses with traumatic backstories. Evil exists, sometimes for no reason, but the emphasis is on the possibility of order being restored. In other words, if death is the mystery, life is the central tenet of such dramas.

Streaming boom

Whether it’s Only Murders in the Building, with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, Enola Holmes, headlined by Millie Bobby Brown, Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out universe, or classics such as Midsomer Murders, or, even The Chelsea Detective, cosy crime — long considered the gentle cousin of the noir-soaked thriller — is having a moment.

The genre has staged a comeback across streaming platforms, each offering a variation on a familiar pleasure, updated for modern sensibilities. Imagine Miss Marple, only more meta. Unlike Scandinavian noir, cosy crime deals in containment. The case is solved, the community survives. There is resolution, even if it arrives with a slice of Battenberg and a raised eyebrow.

It is tempting to write off the genre as escapism, particularly now. The world, after all, is awash in chaos — geopolitical, ecological, algorithmic. In such a climate, a fictional murder, solved over tea, feels like a balm.

But the comfort of cosy crime isn’t only about familiarity. It’s about control. In a world that increasingly denies coherence, these stories offer a tidy, human-scale order. There are clues. There are consequences. Someone, in the end, is accountable. It is a low-stakes emotional investment with a guaranteed return.

Talent of Osman

Osman, a popular quiz show co-host, understands this. His books are written in a tone of conspiratorial warmth — half crime novel, half therapy session. His prose flirts with self-awareness but rarely tips into cynicism. And that may be the secret of Osman’s appeal.

He knows the mystery is only part of the draw. What we really want is the company. That the murders drive the plot, but it’s the community — the layered lives of the people affected — that keeps us watching.

Cosy crime, then, is not a retreat from the world, but a reimagining of how to be in it. A genre where death is present, but not defining. Where age does not mean irrelevance. And where justice still feels possible.

In the end, The Thursday Murder Club is not just a story about solving murders. It’s a story about people who refuse to stop paying attention. And in that refusal — persistent, stubborn, oddly thrilling — there is a whiff of something that feels quite like hope.