Netlix brings popular children's book back to exuberant life in streaming series
When Count Olaf says, “In all honesty I prefer long-form television to the movies; it’s so much more convenient to consume entertainment from the comforts of your own home,” during an episode of Netflix’s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, it’s hard to disagree. He may be an odious, evil, conniving, and dangerous theater actor, but his assessment is fairly spot on.
While I may often disagree, especially because there’s no substitute for the audience experience when it comes to truly great film, technology and creativity have never combined in a more beneficial way than streaming video. There is never a shortage of something new and innovative to watch.
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is one of several new Netflix shows, and as a company, Netflix has pivoted towards original content so much that it’s hard to remember when they mailed DVDs to your house, effectively ending retail giants like Blockbuster video. Some of these new shows fall short: Frontier is very middle of the road, for example, but with Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events they hit the mark so well that they can be forgiven for a few missteps.
The Netflix series isn’t the first attempt at filming the popular children’s book series. A film version of the first few books was released in 2004 with Jim Carey filling the role of Count Olaf to near perfection. The film was well received, even earning an Oscar for Best Makeup, but through a series of unfortunate corporate delays and stalls at Paramount, the franchise was cancelled when the producers realized that child actors age and Emily Browning could no longer convincingly play a ten-year-old.
That Carey was so effective at his role, it was likely a challenge to find someone to step into his unibrow. Neal Patrick Harris may surpass even him. Harris brings a more sinister feeling to the character, while maintaining the same goofy idiocy and hackneyed attempts at theater from the original film.
This isn’t to say that the Netflix series is a carbon copy remake of the 2004 film. It is certainly its own animal, with an exceedingly talented cast that makes it all the more fun to watch.
For those unfamiliar with the story, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is precisely as advertised. It is a tale of loss and woe for the three Baudelaire orphans, young heirs to an immense fortune who have lost their parents in a house fire and been placed with their new guardian, Count Olaf (he’s their closest living relative—just a mile or so down the road).
Of course, Olaf is after their fortune and makes no attempt to hide his intentions. The Baudelaire children are mistreated and shipped from one terrible situation to another, always hounded by the world’s worst actor and his evil henchmen.
The series maintains the grim humor of the books, complete with the constant presence of author Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton) warning the audience that there is no happy ending. Only toil and tribulation lie in store for the Baudelaires.
As I mentioned, the cast is superb. The cast from the original film was also stacked, from Jim Carey to Meryl Streep to Billy Connelly. But the Netflix series holds its own. Not only does it feature Neal Patrick Harris and Patrick Warburton, but also Joan Cusack, Aasif Mandvi, Will Arnett, Colbie Smulders, Alfre Woodard, Don Johnson, and Catherine O’Hara (who was also in the 2004 film.) It’s an ensemble of talent, all participating in creating a strange, dark, beautiful world full of sharp edges and deadly corners.
The series itself runs eight episodes and has been renewed for another ten. Given the success of the current series, there is no doubt that it will tell the complete story. It should satisfy fans of the series that were deprived of the sequels they desired.
One of the benefits of the Netflix model is that the show isn’t confined to telling the story in a traditional running time of a standard television show. If it needs an additional ten to fifteen minutes, it can take them. This is just one of the reasons shows like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events will be the standard for storytelling for years to come.