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Snicketreal name, Daniel Handlerhas seen his woeful world imagined onscreen before, but never so binge-ably.
Are you having a ball?
Credit: Joe Lederer/Netflix
DANIEL HANDLER: It’s been really fun.
Challenging, too, but fun.
Is TV a medium you’d always envisioned for Baudelaire kids?
Do theyhaveto be orphans?"
Pretty basic questions, just because the thought of TV then was so sunny.
It’s been nice not to have those conversations.
Did you have to go back and reexamine the series' overarching mystery for this adaptation?
But in television, you either have to make a mystery or you don’t.
you’re free to’t say, “I hope that people look under the table.”
They won’t look under the table unless the camera looks under the table for them.
Has the mystery itself significantly changed from the books?
I would say that the destination is the same, but the route is different.
Was it important to you to write on every episode?
That’s the nice thing about collaboration.
How precious are you about the material, on a scale of J.K. Rowling to P.L.
I love that scale.
Everybody stop, we have to rebuild it according to the blueprint I have in my head."
I was more interested in what would people think or do.
Tell me about the balance in the demographic, between adults and kids watching this show.
As an adult, when you look at most children’s programming, you cringe.
Can you bridge that gap, as to why the franchise fell apart?
Well, it’s also a mystery to me.
I was commissioned to write a script a few years later, and it was always so serious.
I think that it was really kind of bureaucracy that prevented it before.
The crazy thing is, the movieperformed fairly well.
And, as a fan of the books, I really enjoyed it.
It happens in books all the time.
We will never have the work of Lemony Snicket on the silver screen!
I decree it!"
And there’s not really a lot of that that goes on.
So when Netflix popped up, did you think, “Ugh, another meeting?”
They have a pretty bluntly stated commitment of trying to let creative people do that kind of work.
What’s next for you?
I am deep in season 2.
Is it exciting to get to uncharted territory in season 2?
[Laughs] It is!
It’s nice to go into something that hasn’t been adapted before.
There’s a little feeling of, you have to be this tall to ride this ride.
