“Look away, look away.
Look away, look away.
This show will wreck your evening,
Your whole life and your day.
Every single episode is nothing but dismay.
So look away, look away.
Look away, look away”

This has got to be the best theme music for a TV series ever. How many programs start off from the very first moment telling viewers that they should watch something else?

“A Series of Unfortunate Events,” produced by Netflix, is based on the famous young adult book series of the same name. My kids were kids at about the same time that these books first came out, around 15 years ago. When I began browsing through their dreary covers and pages, I remember first thinking, “What the heck?” But my immediate second thought was, “This is so cool!” The books combined the pessimistic atmosphere of Nathaniel Hawthorne with the dark yet childlike whimsy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They were not only depressing, but they reveled in their despair. They definitely had a weird sense of humor that’s never been quite replicated in other works, a delicate combination of cynicism and sensitivity.

So when news came out that Netflix was producing a series based on the “Unfortunate Events” novels, my first thought was, “That’s great!” But my immediate second thought was, “Will it be good?” Because the filmmakers had to make a choice. If they kept the dismal spirit of the novels, Lemony Snicket fans like myself would be thrilled, but it would be too much of an acquired taste for mainstream audiences. But if they adapted the program in any way to make it more palpable for mainstream audiences, it would kill the very soul of the tales.

I’ve watched all eight one-hour episodes that Season 1 consists of, and I’m glad to inform all Snicket fans out there that the program is indeed true to the spirit of the novels and deliciously dreary. However, if you’re not into witty somberness, you might want to heed the warning by Lemony Snicket himself in the very first episode and look away.

A lot of money, care and love went into the production of this series, because it shows in every exquisitely designed frame and every clever detail. A TV series at this level about this material would never have been done before; at the most, a movie would have been made. And it was, back in 2004, starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. I found the movie at the time to be pretty good, but again, humorous despair is not the kind of thing that becomes a runaway blockbuster hit, and although it made money, no sequels were made.

But at the present, it’s a totally different situation on the television scene now that we have streaming players like Netflix and Amazon. These streaming services rely purely on the number of subscribers and not on the advertising dollars produced by the ratings of each episode. Therefore, they can target narrower audiences, viewer groups that are smaller but more fervent in their preferences. And so, Netflix can stay true to the quirky, dreary humor of the “Unfortunate Events” novels.

You don’t have to have read the novels at all to enjoy the series, I barely remember any of them myself. As long as you have a taste for gentle, poetic gallows humor, you’ll really enjoy the series.

Three siblings—a teen boy and girl, and their baby sister—lose their wealthy parents in a fire, after which a failed theatrical actor named Count Olaf pursues them to attain their inheritance. Or to phrase it differently, three rich kids lose all they have and everything goes downhill from there. The writing and the production are excellent, on par with anything you see in the theaters. Many top-tier actors and actresses also appear in the series. The best performance, however, goes to Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf; you have to be a great actor to convincingly play a bad actor who thinks he’s a great actor. Patrick Warburton also does a fine job portraying the author Lemony Snicket, who is the downcast presenter for the series.

The episodes vary in terms of how entertaining they are; the first one is great, the second one is probably the weakest, the series recovers on the third and keeps a high level of engagement during the rest of the season.

Probably my one complaint of the series is the exaggerated acting by most of the players. Not the kids, not Count Olaf—for whom exaggeration is part of his persona.  But nearly everyone else seems to be in competition for who can give the most cartoonish performance. What these exaggerated performances do is to take away our ability to consider those characters as real people. Even though they’re flesh and blood, they’re only cartoons. So when something happens to them, we don’t feel anything, any more than we would feel something when Daffy Duck blows up in an old Warner Brothers cartoon. It’s not easy to balance humor and tragedy on a continual basis, and to be fair, most programs don’t get it right. But one that does, and one whose tone is similar to this series, is the cult classic “Eerie Indiana” TV series from the 90s. In “Eerie Indiana,” the balance was just right, with outlandish plots grounded by straight acting without the silly scenery chewing. In “Unfortunate Events,” the exaggerated acting is just a little too much sometimes.

Despite any defects, Netflix’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” is a fine piece of programming, and a Season 2 would be quite a fortunate event.

Extra:

• Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Count Olaf, first became well known when he played the boy doctor in the TV series “Doogie Howser, M.D” back in the early 90s.
• You can see Patrick Warburton (Lemony Snicket) any day by going on the “Soarin’” ride in EPCOT, DisneyWorld. While you’re waiting on the line right before you go through the doors, you’ll see Warburton giving you safety instructions on the screens above. He plays tongue-in-cheek “Chief Flight Attendant Patrick” giving you somewhat humorous tips with his baritone, authoritative voice.
• Barry Sonnenfield, one of the executive producers of the series and the director of the first episode, directed the “Men in Black” films and other movies as well.

2021 Update: Since Season 1 appeared, Seasons 2 and 3 followed to complete the series. The second season was all right but seemed to frequently miss the spark that made Season 2 work, while Season 3 got some of the mojo back, enough to finish the series nicely but not completely up to the promise of Season 1. The highlight of season 2 was a pair of circus-based episodes (episodes 9 and 10, “Carnivorous Carnival” Parts 1 and 2) that were a direct reference to the 1932 movie classic “Freaks.”