“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off somewhere else,” Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton), the alter ego of the children’s author Daniel Handler, warns at the outset of Netflix’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” The new show, faithfully adapted by Barry Sonnenfeld from Handler’s popular series of novels, has the familiar structure and feel of an uplifting children’s story: three resourceful orphans struggle to escape the machinations of an evil and greedy count. But much more than the previous adaptation of Handler’s books—a film version from 2004, starring Jim Carrey, which lightened the tone of the books almost beyond recognition_—_the series embraces its source material’s dark, more violent fictional world. The story is, on the one hand, as Sonnenfeld has put it, about how “all children are capable and all adults are horrible.” But, more than that, it’s about resisting the impulse to reassure young viewers that everything will be O.K. In an era of “fake news”—of the proliferation of stories we should know better than to believe—“A Series” provides a welcome, if unsettling, indictment of those who are programmed to shield themselves from difficult truths and fall back, instead, on comforting lies.
When the TV series opens, the Baudelaire siblings, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny (Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, and Presley Smith), are abruptly informed that their parents have perished in a mysterious fire, leaving them with a fortune they cannot use until they come of age. In the course of the first season, which covers the first four books in the series, the children are entrusted into the care of a string of adults, while Count Olaf, a villainous actor played with wonderful campiness by Neil Patrick Harris, plots to assume the children’s guardianship and steal their inherited fortune. Despite Olaf’s laziness, incompetence, and basic stupidity—including a reliance on increasingly implausible disguises and a tendency to accidentally blurt out his evil intentions—only the children are privy to his schemes. Justice Strauss (Joan Cusack) is blinded by her selflessness, Uncle Monty (Aasif Mandvi) is doomed by overconfidence, and Aunt Josephine (Alfre Woodard) finds herself dangerously susceptible to Olaf’s flattery. The literal-minded executor of the Baudelaire parents’ will, Mr. Poe (K. Todd Freeman), is the most easily manipulated: his by-the-book professionalism insures that whomever the children end up with—a relative, a stranger, a murderer—the paperwork is filled out with scrupulous care. It is the Baudelaire children, as it turns out, who recognize that the world is a capricious, irrational, and terrifyingly violent place; the adults who are charged with protecting them persist in a world of complacent self-deception.
Since the first installment of the series, in 1999, Handler’s books have sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. They have also helped to create a new genre of fiction for middle-readers, mixing a gothic morbidity and a linguistic humor to produce a vision of an adult world that is helpless in the face of evil. Handler has explained that he intended his novels as a counter to the moralistic optimism of most children’s literature, exploring the reality that virtue and merit are rarely rewarded. “Stories like these aren’t cheerful,” he wrote in a Times Op-Ed piece, published a month after 9/11, “but they offer a truth—that real trouble cannot be erased, only endured.” The real world is so searing that it cannot be glossed over. Instead, he suggested, “We can find value in stories that admit the world is tumultuous, instead of reassuring us that it is not.” This approach is no less didactic than those that govern more hopeful children’s tales, but the moral is different: Handler’s books, above all, argue for the necessity of looking at the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.
In their struggle to survive, one of the Baudelaire children’s primary tools is reading, and Snicket’s narration is filled with grammatical jokes and a variety of literary references (including to Netflix’s streaming service itself). But while these bookish flourishes strike an educational tone—and Snicket regularly interrupts the action to offer vocabulary lessons, always prefaced by the phrase “which here means”—Handler again turns the lesson on its head: though the solutions to all of the orphans’ problems can be found in a library—and reading is, indeed, fundamental—the Baudelaires’ real education is the power of language to deceive. In episode one, Violet learns the letter of the law so that she can subvert its spirit in episode two; the ultimate value of Aunt Josephine’s careful grammatical lessons is the code the children discover hidden in her (intentional) mistakes. When, in the show’s final installment, the siblings find a book describing how their parents set a fire that destroyed an entire town, they know that there is more to the story because some of the words have been blotted out: where there is fire, they have learned, there is often also smoke and mirrors. As the series continues, a secret organization called VFD becomes increasingly important: as readers of the books will know, for instance, the symbol of an eye that seems to appear everywhere in the show (including in a tattoo on Olaf’s ankle) is actually formed from the letters “V,” “F,” and “D.” But the more they learn, the less they truly understand: the postmodern lesson of the show is that language is dizzyingly open to interpretation. As with adulthood itself—for which the VFD is a kind of allegory—there are no simple lessons or meanings.
From Oliver Twist and Anne of Green Gables to Harry Potter, plucky orphan stories promise a particular kind of narrative resolution: having lost their family, the orphan will—after many trials and tribulations—find a new one. “A Series of Unfortunate Events” makes a different kind of promise, and keeps it. The climax of the first season hinges upon a savage irony that is too good to spoil, deliciously hidden in plain sight from the start. As we anticipate the return of the parents who were lost—in the person of Father (Will Arnett) and Mother (Cobie Smulders)—we discover that we are exactly the kind of adults whose willed ignorance will get children into trouble. We are so well-trained as viewers—so accustomed to stories with happy endings—that when the series makes good on Snicket’s fair warning, it still comes as a shock. We heard his words, but we did not listen. What makes “A Series of Unfortunate Events” more than a simple praise-song to reading is its insistence on how useless, even dangerous, a book can be to those who refuse to read between the lines.
