Review: Mystery and romance pair up in 'Tommy & Tuppence,' while 'Neagley' builds on 'Reacher's' action

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Set us as preferred A new project can always use a helping hand — some popular IP, a respected brand name — to skip to the front of the line and cross the velvet rope to an audience.This week sees two new mystery series with literary roots, which is not necessarily to say in literature.

“Neagley,” now streaming from Prime Video, spins off from “Reacher,” born in the novels of Lee Child.“Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence,” on BritBox starting Wednesday, is “based on the stories and characters of Agatha Christie,” which the detectives among you have deduced has something to do with … Agatha Christie.At the same time, such offspring have something to live up to, expectations to meet, a bar to clear that’s set a little higher than if they were completely original.

(Or as original as any mystery can be after a million have been written.)Tommy and Tuppence, a pair of eventually married investigators, first appeared in Christie’s second novel, “The Secret Adversary,” continued in a series of short stories collected in 1929 as “Partners in Crime,” and made return visits in the novels “N or M?” (1941), “By the Pricking of My Thumbs” (1968) and “Postern of Fate (1973), her final book, though not the last to be published.The characters have come to television twice before, in the the delightful 1983 “Partners in Crime: Tommy and Tuppence,” set in the 1920s, which faithfully adapts several of the short stories, and a 2015 series, also titled “Partners in Crime” and based on “The Secret Adversary” and “N or M?,” which has a Cold War background and an espionage theme.

(Both those series are available to stream, on BritBox and Acorn TV, respectively.)The new series, which stars Antonia Thomas (“The Good Doctor”) as Tuppence and Josh Dylan (“The Buccaneers”) as Tommy...