‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’: Patrick Warburton and Barry Sonnenfeld Preview Netflix’s Take on Lemony Snicket

Here’s how much of a fan Barry Sonnenfeld is of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the 13-novel saga penned by children’s author Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) between 1999 and 2006. The writer/director of such films as Men in Black and TV shows as Pushing Daisies began reading the books to his daughter when she was young, and then continued to make them his own bedtime stories when she outgrew them before the series ended. “What I love about the thesis of the whole series is that all children are capable and wonderful and all adults are equally ineffectual, whether they’re villainous or mean well,” Sonnenfeld tells Yahoo TV.

And he’s brought that thesis, fully intact, to Netflix’s new adaptation of Snicket’s bestselling books, which debuts on Jan. 13. Sonnenfeld directed each of the eight episodes that make up the first of three planned seasons, which will eventually span the entire run of Handler’s books. “Every book is two episodes,” he explains. “So the hope is that there will be 26 episodes in total over three years. We’d better do it fast, though, because everyone’s getting older — including me!”

Of course, Sonnenfeld’s age matters less than the impending growth spurts of the story’s young heroes. Individually they are Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes) and Sunny (Presley Smith), but collectively they are known as the Baudelaire orphans, a trio of precocious children who are left in the care of their only living relative, the dastardly Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris) after their wealthy parents meet an untimely end.

Even in the face of this tragedy, the kids display the capability and wonderfulness that Sonnenfeld loved so much on the page. And, fortunately for them, Olaf manages to be utterly ineffectual in his varied villainous attempts to claim the Baudelaire fortune for himself. Not that he doesn’t put the trio through their paces, finding new and creative ways to imperil them as they travel from home to home, continuing the series of unfortunate events that gives the show its title.

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These events are recounted with cutting precision by Snicket himself, played by regular Sonnenfeld collaborator Patrick Warburton. Sixteen years ago, the duo teamed up for The Tick, a short-lived but much-loved live-action adaptation of the cult comic book hero created by Ben Edlund. And both Sonnenfeld and Handler felt that Warburton would be the ideal vessel for the author’s distinctly dry sense of humor. “Daniel was a fan of a film I did years ago, and he said that character was Lemony Snicket-ish,” he remembers. “It’s a wonderful character. Lemony is disappointed and depressed, and always trying to tell the viewer that there’s something wrong with them for wanting to watch this. I usually like to make things bigger, but for this, I’ve really had to tone it down. Here’s there to put a new perspective on everything.” Toning it down may not have been Warburton’s natural instinct, but Sonnenfeld has nothing but praise for the resulting performance. “What’s amazing about it is that you expect deadpan humor, and you get it, but you also get this layer of sadness and drama that’s never saccharine, but allows us to say saccharine things.”

In the books — and the 2004 film adaptation — Snicket is a removed presence, narrating these unfortunate events as he’s sitting in front of his typewriter transcribing them. For the series, though, Sonnenfeld and Handler made the decision to insert Warburton into the middle of the action, although he pointedly doesn’t interact with any of the other players as they go through the motions of this grimly amusing tale. “It does feel isolating, but at the same time there’s some cool moments of integration with them as they emerge out of the floors and around corners,” the actor says of being a one-man Greek chorus. “I was always intrigued by my talks with Daniel, because you’re looking through the eyes of a writer [with this role]. I was trying to see what makes a mind like his tick, somebody who can create a story that has an impact as great as this one has.”

For the first two episodes — which are adapted from the first novel, The Bad Beginning — both Snicket and the orphans he’s spinning his yarns about remain largely housebound in Olaf’s creaky mansion, which resembles a cross between Edward Scissorhands’s hilltop home and Norman Bates’s house of horrors. But Sonnenfeld promises that the show’s scope expands with subsequent episodes and books, although the production rarely ventured beyond the Vancouver soundstages where Lemony’s world was built from the ground up. “I’d say we spent about 87 percent on the stage, whether you see the characters in a lumber mill or by a giant lake. Stylization plays a big role in this; it was important for me to create a unique and very specific, but also unspecified, world. I love to create worlds that have their own uniqueness to them, whether it’s Pushing Daises or Men in Black.”

Speaking of Pushing Daisies, now that Sonnefeld is part of the Netflix ecosystem, fans of that offbeat detective show/supernatural romance can’t help but wonder if the streaming service will make like Lee Pace’s Piemaker and bring the series back from the dead in the same way they revived Full House and Gilmore Girls. The fact that he and Warburton are part of the producing team behind an updated version of The Tick that Amazon Prime plans to launch later this year may be taken as further cause for hope, although the actor is quick to point out that this new Tick is a very different show.

For one thing, British comic actor Peter Serafinowicz is wearing the titular hero’s blue suit instead of Warburton, who says that, right now, he’s keeping his involvement exclusively behind the camera. “I may [make a cameo] if it makes sense,” he allows. Sonnenfeld is equally restrained about the chances of more Pushing Daisies. “The problem is that Lee Pace and Anna Friel are busy right now. And [creator] Bryan Fuller is busy too. But I know that no matter what, Ellen Greene would stop whatever she was doing to be in Pushing Daisies on Netflix. It’s a great idea; I’m going to call Bryan right after this phone call!”

A Series of Unfortunate Events premieres Jan. 13 on Netflix.