Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events gets right what the movie got wrong

The moment you start watching Netflix’s new show A Series of Unfortunate Events, Neil Patrick Harris implores you to stop. “Look away, look away,” he croons in the opening theme, “This show will wreck your evening, your whole life, and your day.” It’s the same approach the Series of Unfortunate Events books have always taken, both in their text and in their marketing: drawing fans in by telling them their lives would be much more enjoyable if they looked for almost any other story instead. The gimmick works — the fastest way to get kids to read something is to tell them they shouldn’t. Fortunately for Netflix, the television adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events isn’t nearly as terrible as the the marketing, theme song, and narration all claim.

Author Daniel Handler first launched the Series of Unfortunate Events novels in 1999, writing under the pseudonym “Lemony Snicket,” who narrates in both his series and Netflix’s show. In 2004, Nickelodeon adapted the first few Snicket books into a theatrical movie, starring Jim Carrey, that was intended to launch a film franchise. But the film failed to take off at the box office, and the planned sequels were canceled. Now the books are getting the Hollywood reboot on Netflix, with an initial season that fittingly releases on Friday, January 13th.

The show’s plot closely follows the books. (For fans, the eight-episode season covers the events of the first four novels in the 13-book series: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window, and The Miserable Mill.) Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are orphans whose parents die in a mysterious fire. The show documents the (unfortunate) events of their lives as they’re passed around from guardian to guardian. Snicket tells the story of the villainous Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris), who pursues the children, trying to seize their inherited fortune. Along the way, a more substantial conspiracy involving the enigmatic VFD organization emerges as a major factor in the Baudelaires’ lives.

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But the show doesn’t just follow the books’ story beats; it nails down the tone that made the stories so special. Most children’s books tend to treat children like children, but A Series of Unfortunate Events took its audience seriously, refusing to dumb down its content.

Individual novels rarely end on upbeat notes, and Snicket’s narration is quick to remind readers that the Baudelaires’ story isn’t a happy one. Characters are complex and morally gray, and as the series progresses, both the heroes and villains are forced to make choices that blur the lines between them. The world-building is rich with mysterious groups lurking in the background, and a deep interconnected backstory spanning the entire series for attentive readers to uncover alongside the Baudelaire orphans. While the current Netflix episodes only cover a comparatively short chunk of the overall series, it’s clear that they were produced with a great deal of care to ensure the feel of the books made the jump to the screen.

Comparisons between the Netflix series and the 2004 film adaptation are inevitable, especially given how the two projects developed. Barry Sonnenfeld — a self-described fan of the books — was originally slated to direct the 2004 film, and he hired Handler to write the screenplay. After financial setbacks, Sonnenfeld left the project, and new director Brad Silberling discarded most of Handler's script. Netflix's series brings back Handler as writer and Sonnenfeld as director, and both as executive producers.

Sonnenfeld is perhaps best known for directing the Men in Black and Addams Family movies, two franchises that speak to his particular sense of broad, unhinged, often physical humor. That thread follows through in the new series. Sonnefeld also worked as an executive producer on Pushing Daisies, and directed the first two episodes of the short-lived series. That show feels like the strongest influence on A Series of Unfortunate Events: both series rely on a peculiarly colorful yet dark sense of humor, along with mile-a-minute dialogue filled with wordplay, and bizarre humor. Sonnenfeld’s love for CGI — both successful and not — is also on display. The CGI-enhanced physical sets for places like the Lucky Smells Lumber Mill or Uncle Monty’s Reptile Room work well, where the computer-added flourishes help turn the grounded, real-world settings into memorable and fantastic locations. On the other hand, some of the purely digital effects are less convincing, with things coming off as cartoonish. (Fans of the books: the Incredibly Deadly Viper, the destruction of Aunt Josephine’s house, and most of the infant Sunny’s more active scenes are particularly rough.)

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Handler's involvement is apparent in the scripts. Where the film adaptation diverges significantly from the books, Netflix’s series follows the text almost verbatim, which is a double-edged sword. The heavy use of narration is an iconic aspect of the novels, and for longtime fans, it’s great to see it on-screen. But it also serves a crutch, allowing the script to tend toward rambling exposition dumps that tell the story rather than show it. The show also makes the wise move of having Lemony Snicket — the books’ fictional author and unreliable narrator — appear in the show instead of providing an unseen voiceover. Patrick Warburton's deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery helps add a storybook quality, and more importantly, it puts Handler’s memorable monologues about linguistic definitions, literary references, and storytelling techniques on-screen. The books’ metafictional nature has always been one of their most compelling elements, and the show’s embracing of Snicket as a full-blown character gives it the same distinctive tone that made the novels so popular.

The devotion to Handler’s source material is certainly gratifying for series devotees, but it can be a lot for new viewers to take in. The best cultural parallel is another children’s book adaptation, the Harry Potter films. While Christopher Columbus’ series-launching films are the most accurate to Rowling’s books, the obsessive devotion to the source material produces weaker films from a cinematic perspective then, say, Alfonso Cuarón’s looser take on the third novel, which gave the young actors more freedom to express their personalities, and act like kids instead of the stiffer, stilted actors hitting their marks. If Netflix decides to renew A Series of Unfortunate Events for a second season, it could benefit from following the novels less closely and giving its characters — particularly Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, who exist largely to be chased by Olaf and solve problems with their three respective skills — more time to develop as independent entities from their book counterparts.

The Netflix series does benefit from the TV format, with its more generous length: while the feature film crams Handler's first three novels into a single 105-minute block, the TV series gives each novel approximately that much time to unfold on-screen, which allows for more complete adaptations and even new scenes that fill in backstory on events beyond the novels. The show is well aware of its audience, with plenty of references both subtle and obvious to the books, from the Hidden Mickey-esque VFD symbols liberally scattered throughout the episodes to a passing reference to a long-missing sugar bowl.

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There is one major exception, however, when it comes to the show emulating the books — Neil Patrick Harris' Count Olaf is given plenty of freedom to extemporize in bringing the character to life, to mixed results. Early on, the character doesn’t feel like a menacing villain — he’s just clearly Neil Patrick Harris wearing scary old-man makeup. His delivery and mannerisms are almost unchanged from those of say, Barney Stinson. Harris leans so far into the same mock-outrage that his early segments feel like How I Met Your Mother outtakes, complete with a slightly out-of-place musical number in the second episode. However, by the third episode, as Olaf’s schemes get more ridiculous, Harris’ hammy performance works in his favor. The surreal nature of the character’s ridiculous disguises — which only the Baudelaire children (and by extension, the audience) seem to be able to penetrate — and Olaf’s single-minded drive to possess their fortune give Harris an outlet for his own humor. The comic touch makes the moments when he takes off the mask and reveals Olaf’s cold, dark heart far more effective.

After Harris and Warburton, the actual Baudelaires are less important to the overall story. They’re basically walking plot devices. Violet (Malina Weissman, an apparent clone of Emily Browning, who played the film Violet) — and Klaus (Louis Hynes) are the only real characters of the trio, since Sunny is a toddler. But both children do their jobs well, portraying a sense of pluck and upbeat perseverance that make it easy to root for them.

At the beginning of each episode, Snicket continues to appear to reiterate the idea to viewers that they would be better off watching something else, even as the show tries to draws them in with Warburton's velvet-voiced, fantastic delivery, and his references to further mysteries. Viewers will have to decide for themselves whether to take that advice.

All eight episodes of A Series of Unfortunate Events will be available on Netflix on January 13th.