‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’: Nice, Tart Lemony Snicket

The popular kid books known under the collective title A Series Of Unfortunate Events were turned into a 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, but Netflix has undertaken a complete remake and re-imagining of this material. The streaming service’s new Unfortunate Events, headed up by Neil Patrick Harris as the evil Count Olaf, is a handsome production, written by Daniel Handler — who’s also the author of the books, under the pen name Lemony Snicket — and director Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty, The Addams Family).

For those who don’t know, the basic plot is that three orphaned children — Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire — are taken under the un-loving care of Harris’s Olaf, an arrogant idiot who wants the children’s inheritance. He treats them harshly. They, resourceful and brave, fend him off as best they can. The books are narrated by Snicket: Handler adopts an arch tone that is deliberately archaic in its phrasing and redolent of rich irony. The novels were conceived as a tart contrast to the sweetness of so much children’s literature. They also partake of the grim black humor of cartoonists such as Charles Addams (who created the Addams family) and, especially, Edward Gorey, whose effete aestheticism and dandy-ish, bleak worldview in a book such as the essential anthology Amphigorey must be seen as a direct precursor to the Snicket volumes.

For the Netflix series, Patrick Warburton (The Tick) embodies Snicket, both on-camera occasionally and as an omnipresent narrator. His sonorous tone is well-suited for the humorous dread these tales unfurl. Harris as Olaf takes his performance in Gone Girl and raises it to Grand Guignol levels, all sneering malice. The supporting cast, which includes Joan Cusack as a sympathetic neighbor, is excellent.

Related: ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’: Patrick Warburton and Barry Sonnenfeld Preview Netflix’s Take on Lemony Snicket

How much you enjoy these Series of Unfortunate Events depends on your appetite for the TV equivalent of consuming bowlsful of meringue — there’s a lot of excessively rich, fluffy, eggy humor here. The show is, over the long haul of near-hour-long episodes, rather too precious and campy for my taste, but I can certainly imagine a large audience for such well-written joking. The series has already been renewed for a second season, so there’ll be plenty more unfortunate events where these came from.

A Series of Unfortunate Events begins streaming Friday on Netflix.