Bingeworthy Breakdown: Should You Be Watching Netflix & Lemony Snicket's 'A Series Of Unfortunate Events'?

So it’s good?

It really is, actually. I’d put it in the top tier of Netflix shows so far along, maybe a touch under “Stranger Things” (and never hitting the greatness of “BoJack Horseman” or “Orange Is The New Black,” which are very different shows). It captures the wryly miserabilist tone of the books perfectly, unafraid of the darkness (there’s murder aplenty, and Olaf is creepier than in the movie). but throwing plenty of good jokes out, too, from clever meta fourth-wall breakers to slapstick.

It looks pretty, from a distance.

I’d worried from trailers that Sonnenfeld and his regular production designer Bo Welch (who also directs the final two episodes, much better than he directed Mike Myers in “The Cat In The Hat,” his lone feature movie) had landed on a look that was too close to what Brad Silberling and his team came up with in the movie. But the aesthetic ends up feeling quite different in the show — partly because of a greater variety of locations, and partly thanks to a tactile, almost hand-made feel that nods as much to “Grand Budapest Hotel”-era Wes Anderson as it does to someone like Burton. It’s as much a visual treat as anything else that’s ever been on TV (and Sonnenfeld is back on “Get Shorty”/“Men In Black” form, rather than the Kevin Spacey cat movie that was the last thing he directed).

It’s not just style over substance, though, right?

I mean, it’s not “13th” or “The Wire,” no; it’s a dark fantasy family show. But it certainly doesn’t feel insubstantial: It’s a yarn (or a series of yarns), but they’re well-told, and it touches on a fair amount of the human condition: hope and despair, good and evil, all the good stuff. Your tolerance for whimsy might be the biggest marker of whether you respond to the show. If a series of comic cautionary tales with the visual aesthetic of something you might find in a Portland independent greeting-cards store, and scored with Gogol Bordello-style folk sounds like a nightmare, you’re not going to have a good time with it. The rest of us will be over here enjoying it.

I can deal with that. How are the performances?

Strong. As with the look of the show, the kids looked at first glance almost eerily like the ones from the movie, but it wears off pretty quickly, and they’re absolutely solid. K. Todd Freeman and Joan Cusack (as a judge friendly to the children) are both excellent, a reminder that they should both be used more often, and there’s terrific comic work later on from Aasif Mandvi, Alfre Woodard (taking the roles played by Billy Connolly and Meryl Streep in the movie), Catherine O’Hara, a cast-pleasingly-against-type Don Johnson, and Rhys Darby later on. And Usman Ally, who plays Olaf’s chief henchman The Hook-Handed Man, is a real find.

What about Neil Patrick Harris?

Well, he’s sort of one of two major reservations we have about the show.

That’s ominous.

Not really. He’s a talented dude, and in isolation, it’s a brilliant performance that he’s clearly having a ton of fun doing, playing to most of his strengths (he even sings the theme tune).

So what’s the problem?

As with Carrey in the movie, it feels like he’s in a slightly different show to everyone else, a broader, funnier one, and it can risk sucking up all the oxygen from the scenes when he’s on screen. You get more used to him as it goes on, but we’d have been curious to see what would have happened with a more chameleonic actor — a Bill Hader, for instance — in the role.

Maybe without Doogie Howser, it would have missed having a big star at the center for everything else to orbit around, though?

Maybe. Maybe.

You mentioned another reservation.

Yeah, and this one’s much bigger. It’s a problem with the structure of the show, almost less than with the adaptation as much as it is with the source material. There’s kind of a repetitive nature to the Snicket books — the kids get taken somewhere new, meet a colorful guest guardian, Olaf turns up disguise, tries to kill them, fails, rinse, repeat. And the faithfulness of the adaptation here means that the stories start to fall into formula a bit.

Hmmm.

The short length of the season means that it isn’t too much of a problem here, and the creatives have clearly tried to course-correct a bit, playing up the serialized mystery element with some characters not in the books — a badass secretary played by “Vampire Diaries” actress Sara Canning, who is a very welcome addition, and a couple about whom we won’t say too much, played by big-name guests Cobie Smulders and Will Arnett.

Will Arnett? Is he like Netflix’s official mascot at this point?

Kind of. Rather this than another season of “Flaked,” though.

So does this serialized thing work?

Not massively — it’s a pretty brief part of the episodes, normally towards the end. Hopefully the second season (which is all but an inevitability) will be a bit more creative in mixing it up, otherwise it’ll risk falling into formula. Then again, being formulaic could be a virtue for younger audience members, we guess.

Still, kind of a bummer.

Don’t get too down on it — we still enjoyed the show enormously despite that major flaw, and even as the stories become more predictable, there’s more than enough to keep you enjoying it. It’s ambitious and not really like anything else on Netflix or elsewhere, and it’s good to see the streaming service’s hefty budgets being put to something more fun than “Narcos,” especially a family show like this. This could well turn out to be one of their crown jewels.