Miss Marple was played by Geraldine McEwan for the first three series before her retirement from the role, and by Julia McKenzie from the fourth series onwards.

Dr Haydock appeared in three different episodes but was portrayed by three different actors: Robin Soans, Robert Powell, and Neil Stuke.

Miss Marple's old friend Jason Rafiel was voiced by Herbert Lom in Nemesis, while Lom also made an on-screen appearance as a different character, Mr Dufosse, in The Murder at the Vicarage; the role of Rafiel was later played on screen by Antony Sher in A Caribbean Mystery.

The series featured real-life historical and fictional celebrity characters, including Winston Churchill in The Sittaford Mystery, Noël Coward in 4.50 from Paddington, Louis Armstrong in At Bertram's Hotel, and novelist Ian Fleming alongside ornithologist James Bond in A Caribbean Mystery, whose name Fleming borrowed for his own spy character.

Unlike the more faithful companion series Agatha Christie's Poirot, Marple took significant liberties with the source material, most notably by inserting Miss Marple into adaptations of novels in which she never actually appeared, such as By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Ordeal by Innocence, Towards Zero, Murder Is Easy, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, The Pale Horse, and The Secret of Chimneys.

The show was filmed at numerous English stately homes and locations, including Knebworth House (used for Rutherford Hall's exterior and also in Greenshaw's Folly), Highclere Castle (used for Rutherford Hall's interior), and Hatfield House (used as Chimneys and also in Greenshaw's Folly).

A Caribbean Mystery was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, with its beach scenes shot at Boulders Beach, standing in for the story's Caribbean setting.

Due to content deemed sensitive, Chinese broadcaster CCTV-8 refused to air The Body in the Library and Murder Is Easy because of a lesbian relationship and an incestuous relationship respectively, while Why Didn't They Ask Evans? was heavily edited because of its War-period China content.

The series received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Special Class Program in 2005, and composer Dominik Scherrer won a Gold Medal at the New York Festivals in 2006 for his original music.