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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Netflix announced new original series based on Lemony Snicket's famous books

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"Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" flopped at the box office in 2004, but will hopefully reconnect with fans as a Netflix original series.

Another Netflix original is set to join the ranks of critically acclaimed and ravenously consumed series such as “Orange Is the New Black” (2013 - present), “House of Cards” (2013 - present) and “BoJack Horseman” (2014 - present). The company will adapt the delightfully morbid and macabre children’s books franchise “A Series of Unfortunate Events” for the small screen, a Nov. 13 press release announced.

After hitting the movie theaters a decade ago next month, Lemony Snicket’s beloved Baudelaire orphans -- Violet, Klaus and Sunny -- promptly disappeared from the pop-culture landscape. The 2004 film was a modest-to-mediocre hit compared to expectations and, despite buzz, there was no sequel. Furthermore, author Daniel Handler, pen name Lemony Snicket, seemed to accept that yesterday’s tweens -- that’s right, those awful millennials -- had left the orphans behind, and began to publish new works under his familiar alias.

“I was ready to abandon the Baudelaire orphans, but I wasn’t ready to abandon Lemony Snicket,” Handler said, perhaps with a hint of humor, in a 2012 interview with the New York Times.

Still, whether Handler is ready or not, the Baudelaires are making a comeback. Though the release date for this series is currently unknown, fans and critics of the series may well wonder, "Why now?"

Netflix Vice President of Original Content Cindy Holland hinted that the decision to bring the series back to life has more than a little to do with nostalgia.

“On the search for fantastic material that appeals to both parents and kids, the first stop for generations of readers is ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events.’ We are proud to start work on a series for a global audience that already loves the books,” Holland said.

Well then, nostalgia and predictable business tactics it is. As Holland indicated, Netflix seems to be taking advantage of the fact that a large portion of its target audience is familiar with, and even fond of, Lemony Snicket and “A Series of Unfortunate Events” -- which includes books published from 1999 to 2006.  But can it take that to the bank? If the 2004 film -- which condensed the plots of the first three books into a modest 108 minutes -- is any indicator, wide-scale recognition does not guarantee that these orphans will be moneymakers.

After all, “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” had a total domestic gross profit of around $118 million, a measly sum compared to box office revenues generated by “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” the same year, or even 2005’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” both of which brought in over $200 million domestically. And presumably, the Baudelaires were better known and more popular in the mid-2000s, when the kids that grew up with the books were closer to the series’ intended age range, than they are today.

Undoubtedly, the new series will be as much of a risk for Netflix as a departure from the edgy, adult-oriented programming that has characterized previous hits like “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards.”

However, it seems that Netflix will be looking to right some of the movie’s wrongs in its treatment of Handler’s work. In her review, New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis criticized “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” for its cluttered and awkward screenplay. This after Handler was infamously fired as the project's screenwriter … despite the fact he had already written eight drafts of the script. For Dargis, at least, the result was a movie with “grievous” faults, lacking “the author's sense of whimsy (or irony).” Perhaps in an attempt to avoid this kind of creative bungling, Handler will be an executive producer of the Netflix series.

With Handler at the helm, twenty-somethings who loved the series in simpler days of braces and Floam can remain optimistic that “A Series of Unfortunate Events” will be resurrected again, with all the charm and chills of the original books.