“If only this world weren’t such a wicked and topsy-turvy place.”
There’s a lot that A Series of Unfortunate Events does right, and an almost equal amount that could potentially turn off viewers. It’s funny and imaginative in pleasing doses, and at times genuinely engrossing, but it also traffics in weapons-grade quirk that at times threatens to undermine the show entirely. It’s a balancing act, to be sure, and it will be interesting to see how it develops over the course of its debut season.
It will come as no surprise that Neil Patrick Harris nearly steals the show completely. We hear him before we see him; Harris sings the opening theme song, crooning “Look away, look away,” becoming one of many people to tell us exactly how unpleasant the story is that we’re about to watch. It’s a clever, meta touch, one that is of a piece with Unfortunate Events’ purposefully fanciful world. It knows it’s a story, and most of the time that works in the show’s favor.
What I was more surprised by was Unfortunate Events‘ secret weapon: Patrick Warburton, playing the author Lemony Snicket in a Rod Serling/Greek chorus capacity. Having never read the books, I don’t know if this is part of the narrative, but if it is, it translates very well. Warburton, dressed in somber greys, delivers one of his most toned-down performances every. He’s an actor who usually goes very big, and it’s nice to see him so easily filling a more subdued role. There’s nothing quirky or twee about Warburton, which makes for a nice contrast with everything else going on. Of all the actors, he does the best job of conveying the sadness of the story, and gets some of the choicest lines (my personal favorite: “Not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning”).
Most of the show’s aesthetic is borrowed from early Tim Burton, most obviously Edward Scissorhands. Director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black) isn’t a very innovative director, but he’s decent at staging a scene, and utilizes color splashes well (he started his career as the cinematographer for the Coen brothers, shooting both Blood Simple and Raising Arizona).The production design (by Bo Welch) and score (by James Newton-Howard) recall Burton’s work none too subtly, but the show’s lead characters are right out of Wes Anderson, our foremost chronicler of preternaturally mature children.
The Baudelaire children – Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes), and the infant Sunny (Presley Smith) – all have their own talents, which will be make-or-break for a lot of viewers. Violet is a mechanical whiz, Klaus has a penchant for classic literature (I like the inversion of outdated gender roles there), and Sunny can speak, but only her siblings can understand her. Sunny also has super sharp teeth, which, like her talking, is a joke that never really pays off; Unfortunate Events would play just as well for me, if not better, without Sunny’s presence. But hey, it’s a kick to see a baby listed in the opening credits. And all three actors are talented; they have good chemistry together and really seem like a team of siblings put in an impossible situation.
The world of the show is meant to look not only fanciful but manufactured, part and parcel of its awareness of itself as a story. Some of the strange details can be a little too over the top to be effective, though. Joan Cusack does nice work in her role, but she’s playing a judge who goes by Justice Strauss and wears a wig like a barrister. In a particularly lame gag, people keep defining words for the Baudelaires, which is funny the first two or three times it happens, but by the fifth or sixth time in a 46-minute episode, the joke has worn out its welcome. And like in a lot of literature focused on children, adults are written as either saintly (like Cusack’s Strauss) or ghastly (Mrs. Poe, played by Cleo King, who can’t understand why the children aren’t happier to be written about in a front-page story; she’s basically one of the Harry Potter series’ Dursleys writ large).
Harris somehow manages to make all this work, though. His casting as Count Olaf is a great example of the most obvious choice being the right choice as well. Olaf is like a funhouse mirror version of Harris himself, theatrical, demanding, and egotistical. He both fits in and stands out with the world of the show, where even amongst all these quirky characters he seems like the strange one (I will say this: the show moves so quickly that it forces you to accept the world, meaning it’s not out of place or even surprising when a musical number breaks out). Impressively, Unfortunate Events isn’t shy about making him seem menacing and violent. In a nicely tense scene, an enraged Olaf holds Sunny above his head, and Violet and Klaus are unsure if he’s going to drop her or not. Later, he slaps Klaus across the face, sending him to the ground, which is a nice bit of dimensionality. The show wouldn’t survive if it were that dark all the time, but I like getting a small glimpse at the black heart beating underneath the strangeness.
Overall, I find myself not very invested in Olaf’s scheme to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune, because the strength of A Series of Unfortunate Events is in its characters, and I like Olaf and the Baudelaire children enough to check out episode two. Plus, “The Bad Beginning: Part One” had one of my favorite reveals of recent television, when we learn that not only are the Baudelaires’ parents still alive, but they’re played by Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders. Reservations aside, that’s enough to get me excited.
A Few Thoughts
- I’m going to use this space primarily to list my favorite Olaf lines. “The shampoo is not tear-free. If anything it encourages tears.” “Remarkable woman. Flammable.” “If you work extra hard you get to go to the ball…room. Which is even grimier.” “The plural of ‘bed’ is ‘bed.'”
- I hate to side with Olaf, but Violet and Klaus’s pasta Puttanesca looked pretty plain to me too.
3.5/5
Related articles
About Author
