A Series of Unfortunate Events

It feels like the world has moved on from Netflix’s pricey, largely faithful adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The third and final season was unloaded on the streaming service New Year’s Day, and the critical response has been muted. The series got plenty of attention when it first launched three years ago, but it failed to be an ongoing phenomenon on the level of a Stranger Things, and Netflix did not seem to throw much of a promotional campaign behind the second and third seasons. The money was already spent, and while it’s impossible to figure out what logic underpins the business behavior of any streaming service, I doubt they’ll try anything as expensive and ambitious for a while. Not when cheap filler like All the Boys I’ve Loved Before or the Fyre Festival documentary is just as likely to seize the popular imagination for a week or so.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is more interesting to consider as a test case for what happens when Netflix tries to outdo old Hollywood than it is as a work of self-contained dramatic fiction. Perhaps that’s why the second and third seasons failed to gain much traction. There’s not all that much to say about them in and of themselves. The same flaws that were present in the first season continued to the end. The biggest changes from the book series were more interesting at the outset than they were at the conclusion. As much as the TV show tried to correct the failings of the earlier film adaptation, it struggled with the same basic problem. Making children the center of a macabre story with many murders and deaths and constant mortal peril plays very differently on screen than it does on the page.

The Netflix series never settled on a consistent tone, and it often felt distant and disengaged from its main characters. It didn’t help matters much that two of the leads, Malia Weissman’s Violet and Louis Haynes’ Klaus, were child actors with obvious handicaps. Weissman (who also plays the young Kara in Supergirl flashbacks) is fine with dialogue, but limited to one stock facial reaction. Haynes is expressive but marble-mouthed. Over the course of the three seasons they were regularly upstaged by their infant sibling, played by a mixture of CGI and tiny, charming Presley Smith. The show also developed a habit of overindulging its celebrity producers. Author Daniel Handler, who must have felt like the Jim Carrey movie misrepresented what was best about his book series, oversaw the writing and installed an endless number of Patrick Warburton monologues directly from the text. These wordy interludes grew more and more distracting as the series wore on and became clear that Warburton’s Lemony Snicket character was not going to add anything to the narrative or make any of the running mystery storylines more clear. And Neil Patrick Harris was allowed to chew scenery as if his Count Olaf was the star of the show, most so in the flabby second season.

It just never got great, although there was enough to keep you watching. The visual style of the piece was fantastic, with lovely costumes and sets. The casting for the supporting roles was wonderful, even as the story regularly let them down. It was great to see Nathan Fillion delivering dialogue with some style again. Tony Hale, Joan Cusack, Alfre Woodard, Kerri Kenney, Max Greenfield, Morena Baccarin, David Alan Grier, Will Arnett, and Ken Jenkins all popped up at one point or another. Lucy Punch dressed as an octopus. Sara Rue stole some episodes as one of the all-time sexy librarians, and got to do a magnificently terrible Gypsy accent. There were lots of good scenes and good jokes. A few times the writing indulged in modern, self-referential humor that was a poor fit for the retro, timeless setting, but for the most part the comedy was sharp and appropriate for the series theme of myopic adult incompetence.

In retrospect the fatal decision made was rigidly assigning two episodes to each of the thirteen books in the series. The third season injected more action and variety, but the structure got repetitive well before that. Too many of these pairs had endless first hours full of setup, then a predictable second part divided between plot complications and action sequences. Count Olaf’s habit of adopting a costume and alias for each new setting was abandoned by the last couple of episodes, but the series also seemed to forget about each of the Baudelaire children’s special abilities by the time it was over. Much of the last batch showed them reacting blandly to peril after peril, proceeding by sheer luck, and having things revealed to them by characters we weren’t sufficiently invested in. The series had a real addiction to setting up important allies only to have them disappear or perish, with Allison Williams’ Kit being only the most gratuitous example. Olivia Caliban deserved a better fate.

While the third season delivered more excitement and promised revelations than the second, it ended strangely. A bizarre trial sequence featuring most of the surviving support characters revealed how the show never set up coherent rules for its fantasy world. Count Olaf’s entire cohort of henchmen exited abruptly, with few getting any sort of meaningful payoff, even though we ultimately spent as much time with them over the course of the three seasons as we did the Baudelaires. K. Todd Freeman’s recurring bureaucrat moron Mr. Poe never received the comeuppance he had coming. Nor did Punch’s inconsistently written diva Esmé Squalor. Nor did Kitana Turnbull’s nightmare brat Carmelita, even after all the time we had to spend listening to her sing in Season Two. The final episode, the first in the entire series not to merit a two-parter, airlifted in some totally jarring Biblical symbolism, out of place in a series which was soaked in 19th- and early 20th-century literature the whole time. It was a very strange landing place.

In summary, it was a show made by talented writers, actors, and filmmakers that never quite got to running on all cylinders, and it’s hard not to examine what role Netflix might have played in that failure. Barry Sonnenfeld got the visual look so right, and the cast was so good. All it needed was some sharper editing, and perhaps an experienced television writer to balance out Handler’s weaknesses. If this had been a premium cable production, would it have played out differently? Or would it have never even survived to complete the story?

What’s unique to the Netflix model is that the normal creative pressures that work upon a continuing television series don’t exist with the same transparency. Netflix isn’t crunching the same numbers as everybody else. They just need to add to their subscriber numbers. In a sense, cancelling something as expensive as A Series of Unfortunate Events is just bad publicity for them. Having succeeded in getting people to write and talk about the first season, there are worse outcomes than having the second and third years land with somewhat of a thud. Receiving a bunch of negative press about such an ambitious project failing is the last thing they need. It would make viewers nervous about the future of their favorite shows, and more importantly, it would make big creative stars less willing to go into business with the streaming service. To date, the highest-profile things Netflix has canceled in progress are the superhero shows Iron Fist and Daredevil, and they have successfully positioned that as Marvel Television’s failing and not their own.

The disappointing Marvel shows are not without lessons for Netflix’s in-house development. Surely some executive is learning from all these shows that repeat the same mistakes while remaining somehow impervious to improvement. Would it have been impossible to look at the first season of Unfortunate Events and make changes? I don’t know enough about the business side of things to say. It’s easy for an outside viewer to eye the thing critically and say that it would work better if each story was one movie a little more than an hour long instead of two episodes nearly twice that length. The same viewer would also probably argue in favor of cutting down on the narration and the hammy showcases for the adult actors. If they were feeling really smart, they might also suggest that the conspiracy theory nonsense could be cut way back.

For all I know, the way the contracts were written up, none of those changes were possible. Netflix and Hulu have attracted big-league talent by allowing them total creative freedom. Sonnenfeld and Handler sold the thing as 25 episodes, and that’s the show they made. I don’t know if there was ever a question that they weren’t going to get to do the whole thing, and I doubt there was ever a point while it was in progress where Netflix went to the filmmakers and said they wanted adjustments. That’s how they’re doing business right now, which is how we get things like Maniac that are full of stars but make no sense, or the second season of a show like Friends From College that no one actually likes.

But things are going to change. This time next year, there will be four or five major streaming services competing. Netflix is going to lose a ton of movies, and keeping staples like The Office and Friends is going to get more and more expensive. Disney and CBS and Hulu and Amazon will have prestige shows with name talent too. As its profit margins narrow, Netflix is going to have to pay at least a little attention to the bottom line for its creative projects. No network or studio has ever stayed in business long granting total creative freedom. You know what happens when you grant total creative freedom? John From Cincinnati happens. Nobody wants to live through that again. The point being, A Series of Unfortunate Events is a rare thing. The era of these streaming series that are good but flawed getting to run out their entire lives without any kind of network interference will be over soon if it isn’t already. I’m all for it. One of my favorite things about television, the thing that separates it from film, is the way shows have to grow and adapt. There’s a conversation that happens between viewers and writers, and in between network executives and creative types. That’s a good thing, a thing that should happen. No one can insulate themselves from the outside world forever, not even Netflix.