A Series of Unfortunate Events - 'The Bad Beginning: Part 2'

"And I also act."

The Baudelaire orphans are in a bad place, as you may recall from my last review, but fear not reader. They could be in a much worse place, as 'The Bad Beginning: Part 2' sets out to prove.

We open with a flashback explaining how Count Olaf engineered his adoption of the orphans (a scene absent from the book, and which Lemony Snicket explains is a flashback included to get the television executives off his back.) Flashing forward again, we see the Count move rapidly into phase two of his plans, inviting the orphans to join his latest theatrical effort and disarming any doubts in Justice Strauss's mind by offering her the chance to fulfill her own acting ambitions. This, the orphans soon realise, is an elaborate set-up allowing the Count to legally marry Violet (his adopted daughter, so eww,) without anyone official kicking up a fuss.

Just so creepy.

Unfortunately, the Count's henchmen nobble Mr Poe's secretary in order to keep him in the dark, and kidnap Sunny to force Klaus and Violet to do his bidding. All seems doomed, but once the Count has announced his success and so revealed his true colours to the crowd, Violet springs her masterstroke: That she signed the marriage license with the wrong hand(1). The secretary and her associate Gustav reveal that the orphans were always supposed to go to their Uncle, but Olaf escapes with his minions, Gustav is killed while waiting for the orphans to arrive, and the apparent Baudelaire parents determine that they must escape their current captivity after seeing the headlines about the play. And in the narrative space, Lemony Snicket absconds through a window ahead of unseen pursuers.

A Series of Unfortunate Events continues to be a darkly brilliant gem, and I am genuinely delighted to have overcome my initial reticence. Neil Patrick Harris is a big part of its success, with his bravura turn as the Count front and centre now the introductory section is out of the way, but Patrick Warburton continues to dazzle as the melancholy narrator, and Malina Weissman and Louis Hynes are nothing short of sensational as the older Baudelaire children, delivering their long, complex and stilted lines with total deadpan sincerity and complete comprehension. In fact, I might go so far as to suggest that the real brilliance of the show lies in not allowing Harris to run away with every scene, because with that performance he easily could.

It also bears noting that the show just looks amazing. The production design is lavish, gorgeous and quite unique, with every costume, set and space serving the scene it is part of. The cinematography is exquisite; in short, every part of the show is deserving of a thesaurus-worth of superlatives, each one lovingly and wryly deconstructed by Lemony Snicket. Will it continue at this standard? We shall have to see.

(1) This is, of course, legal nonsense, but so is anyone persuading a lawyer or accountant that 'closest relative' would ever refer to geographical proximity.

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.