Reverse psychology is an effective strategy to deploy on children, cartoon characters and, I'm told, prospective car buyers: "Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that . . . " Lemony Snicket, the pseudonymous author of A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix), has used the technique liberally, beginning each of his 13 accounts of the miseries of the Baudelaire orphans with a dire entreaty not to read them.
"Not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle," insists The Bad Beginning, announcing a chronicle of unceasing ironic glumness that I found entirely joyful when I first discovered it at the tender age of my early 30s.
Already adapted for cinema in 2004 as a misbegotten Jim Carrey vehicle, the story of the Baudelaire siblings – inventor Violet, bookish Klaus and razor-toothed infant wiseacre Sunny – now hits the small screen and looks all the better for it.
“Look away, look away,” implores the theme tune, sung by Neil Patrick Harris’s overbaked villain, Count Olaf, with necessary powers of dissuasion. “This show will wreck your evening, your whole life and your day,/ Every single episode is nothing but dismay.”
Unhappiness has always been a feint for Snicket's alter ego, Daniel Handler (bad as the orphans have it, the Grimm Brothers inflicted far worse with fewer disclaimers). Writing the show for director Barry Sonnenfeld, and casting the divinely straitlaced Patrick Warburton as narrator Snicket (imagine Don Draper fronting Dragnet) the results match Handler's wryly verbosity with zippy visual inventiveness. It's like a confection designed to boost your word power.
Victorian riff
In the books, this is an archly Victorian riff, with deadpan examples of hardship and thesaurus-worthy digressions that suggest a desire to improve the reader’s character, safe in the knowledge that it never will. On the screen, the kids are dropped into pleasingly unreal landscapes, layered with sets, models on pop-up book backgrounds, sometimes sheeny with CGI – Sonnenfeld makes green screen technology as contentedly anachronistic as the whirring rotors of vintage adornments.
No special effect, however, is quite as farfetched as Neil Patrick Harris. As Count Olaf, the severe, bankrupt, vainglorious ham actor and charlatan, peddling horrors and purveying alternative facts, he seems outré for any authority figure (although not quite as implausible as Donald Trump, with whom he shares a hairdresser).
All this fits the small screen snugly, faithfully rationing out the plots of the novels, embellishing them freely, and translating literary gags into fleet self-reference. “As an actor, I think live theatre is a much more powerful medium than, say, streaming television,” Olaf tells an adoring journalist. The light touch of the series is what might happen if you married both.
A Series of Unfortunate Events is aimed, fittingly, at two compatible audiences: the precocious kids who don't baulk at a programme that talks up to them, and wised-up postmodernists who slip unabashedly into a suspended state of childhood. The show makes no distinctions. One device occurs all too often in the story of the Baudelaire siblings, interjects Snicket, "which is called dramatic irony."
Today’s fascinated young viewers are the implacable television critics of tomorrow. Look away.
