Fierce Fidelity and Careful Transformation ADAPTING LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS FOR NETFLIX

‘This show will wreck your evening, your whole life and your day.’ These words ring out from the opening titles of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, breaking the fourth wall and more – warning away the audience, but doing so in a way that invites them to enjoy the tragedy that will unfold on their screens. By the third season, the theme song acknowledges that anyone who is still watching ‘has clearly lost all reason’. Sung by the villainous character Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris), it covertly invites us to keep watching, but to do so as competent, intelligent consumers of scary tales. In this way, it is the perfect articulation of a key message in the series of children’s books that Unfortunate Events adapts: that young audiences, like adults, can gain pleasure from dark stories, and that tragedy as a form of storytelling should not necessarily be off limits to children. This is but one of many touchpoints in which the television series, as an adaptation, performs its fierce fidelity to the themes, moods and overall brand identity of its source material.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is one of a number of adaptations and reboots to appear in the Netflix catalogue in recent years. Indeed, adaptation has become a strategy used by the streaming provider to target children and families: Unfortunate Events sits alongside family-oriented adaptations, reboots and franchise extensions including Dragons: Race to the Edge, Lost in Space, Fuller House and Anne with an ‘E’. More broadly, the Netflix adaptation exists within a climate of reimagining, renewing and remaking that defines children’s culture today, and is best exemplified by Disney’s current strategy of producing live-action remakes of its animated classics. If we look beyond children’s culture, too, we find a proliferation of adaptations as products and a mainstreaming of adaptation as a practice. As academic Siobhan O’Flynn has noted, ‘Adaptations are often undertaken to capitalize on an existing fan base.’ Reimagining a text that is already popular, beloved or appreciated on some level is a safe strategy for media providers such as Netflix, a means of guaranteeing some degree of success in a risk-averse production environment – all the more so when it comes to targeting young audiences, who can be unpredictable in their responses to new media products.