A Series of Unfortunate Events - 'The Bad Beginning, Part 1'

It is uncommonly difficult to accurately and comfortably assign to the
television adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events a definite genre. The
closest I can get is probably the Gothic; a word used here to mean a style of
fiction characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent
events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay

From the first, Netflix's adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events announces its intention to hew closely to the conceits of the original. Patrick Warburton is a constant, dour presence as Lemony Snicket, self-appointed and duty-bound chronicler of the story of the Baudelaire orphans, informing us that this is a story bereft not only of a happy ending, but of a happy beginning or any happy events. By this point we have already been advised to go and watch something more cheerful by the morbidly upbeat theme tune.

Snicket introduces the three orphans - brilliant inventor Violet, absurdly well-read Klaus, and Sunny, an infant with a high level of expression and razor teeth - on the day that they learn of their parents' death in an unexplained fire which also destroys their home and, thanks to the geographically literal mind of their executor Mr Poe, sees them sent to the crumbling home of their mysterious Uncle Olaf. Discovering that they don't come with a wodge of cash, but rather with an untouchable trust fund, Olaf sets the children to work in his house, while he rehearses with his grotesque 'acting troupe'. The children befriend a judge who lives across the road, but all in all are in a very bad place, just as Snicket warned us.

Dodgy beard, child cruelty and singing.

I can't claim to be a great fan of the books A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I think part of that was that I first started reading them while I was teaching, and it's actually kind of hard to read this tale of benighted children surrounded by adults who range from actively malevolent to uselessly well-meaning, all of whom end up as either an active or a passive agent in the long process of making the Baudelaires' lives rubbish, if you're also attending safeguarding training. As much as I didn't care for the content, I did appreciate the arch humour of the first two books, and it's good to see that translated to the screen via a narrative device who feels like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. In addition, the non-naturalistic dialogue is wonderfully performed - most notably by the two older children - so as to convey that the stilted wording and repeated phrasings is an artefact of Snicket's recreation of the events.

Now, it's possible that the style will get old, and I'm not sure this will ever be a series that I at any rate would want to binge watch. This first 42 minute dose, however, helped down with a spoonful of foreshadowing not present in the books, is a gloomy little gem.