A Series of Unfortunate Events unfolds anew

Pick of the day: A Series of Unfortunate Events, streaming on Netflix.

Klaus Baudelaire faces the evil Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events, streaming on Netflix.

Pick of the day: A Series of Unfortunate Events, streaming on Netflix.

“This story will be dreadful, melancholy and calamitous,” warns the Lemony Snicket character narrating this eight-part series premiering today on Netflix.

Snicket is voiced by Patrick Warburton, also responsible for the voice of Family Guy’s wheelchair-bound cop Joe Swanson but maybe best remembered as Elaine’s boyfriend Puddy in Seinfeld.

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler, who wrote the 13 children’s books that comprise A Series of Unfortunate Events, adapted here for Netflix by executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Men in Black.

Neil Patrick Harris, who first shot to fame in Doogie Howser MD in the late 1980s and early 90s, and more recently featured in How I Met Your Mother, plays the evil Count Olaf who seeks to take advantage of his recently orphaned young relatives, 14-year-old Violet Baudelaire (Malina Weissman), 12-year-old Klaus (Louis Hynes) and infant Sunny (Presley Smith) after their parents “perish” in a fire.

“Count Olaf is, quite honestly, just a horrible person. It’s called A Series of Unfortunate Events due in great part to him,” Harris says. “He is on a hellbent crusade to become very wealthy through the Baudelaires’ misfortune … if he can only find a way to get rid the children .”

A standout feature of this new series is the production design by Bo Welch (the Men in Black films, Thor, Edward Scissorhands): heightened, whimsical and reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s films.

What this show shares in common with the great children’s fairytales is a willingness to “go into the woods to confront the witches and ogres”, as it were, or the death of one’s parents and the arrival of rapacious relatives in this case, with the reassurance that people will help you along the way, and love and integrity will prevail in the end.