A Series of Unfortunate Events

Lemony Snicket's gothic children's saga made misery into a running joke, and this collection pairs the source novels with their two screen adaptations. The premise is fixed and gleefully bleak: the three Baudelaire orphans, orphaned by a fire, are pursued from guardian to guardian by the villainous Count Olaf, who wants their fortune. The narrator's mournful asides and vocabulary lessons are the real voice of the thing.

The 2004 film compressed the early books into a single handsome, underseen feature with Jim Carrey as Olaf, while Netflix's 2017 series gave the story the room it needed, casting Neil Patrick Harris and running the full arc. The books remain the definitive form, but the series is the better adaptation. Bleak, witty, and unusually honest with young readers about loss.

The A Series of Unfortunate Events franchise spans 1 series, 4 books, 1 films in the CrossBinge catalog.