TV Season Review - Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (Season 1)

A long while ago, Paramount and Nickelodeon released a film adaptation of a series of books by Lemony Snicket which was met with a positive response from everyone both critics and audiences alike and in some ways, was going to be competing with WB's Harry Potter films with that film originally going to be the starting point of what would've been a series of films, but it never happened with it going into development hell and then eventually shelved. Such was the case with other films like the Narnia and Percy Jackson films. Then more recently in light of the success Netflix was having with their original programming, they teamed up with Paramount Television to create a TV series adaptation of the books and unlike the film, actually adapt all the books to be spread across at least 3 seasons. So today, let's talk about the first season which adapts material from the first to the fourth book of the series:

Much like with the film, the TV series breaks the 4th wall in telling you to not watch these Unfortunate Events and instead watch something else. Whether you take that literally or not is up to you. Anyway, so as narrated by Lemony Snicket himself (played by Patrick Warburton aka Kronk from Emperor's New Groove and Joe from Family Guy), we meet the Baudelaire children consisting of Violet (played by Malina Weissman aka young April O'Neil from 2014's TMNT and young Kara from Supergirl), Klaus (played by Louis Hynes) and Sunny (physically played by Presley Smith, but voiced by Tara Strong) who are enjoying a day together. But when the news of their parents having been burned in a fire reaches them, their fortune is left to them and they are then put under the care of one Count Olaf (played by Neil Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother fame) who will stop at nothing to get their fortune even if they are put under the care of someone else.

So one thing I will say about the first season is that it feels like watching the film if it wasn't rushed too much and handled events that occurred in the books in a manner that keeps the series flowing and actually stays faithful to the source material. I myself haven't read any of the books (though I hope to do so in the future), but I can say that in many ways, its better than the film as it chooses to have less of an all star cast with only a handful of well known actors, but also a few amateur actors too. Its very dark, very depressing with a bit of fun and creativity in some areas and it lives up to its name. And I look forward to see where this goes in later seasons. 9/10