An Open Letter To Netflix, Or A Series of Unfortunate Children's TV Shows

Dear Netflix and its Mighty Overlords,

How are you? I sincerely hope you are well. More than well. I hope you are elated, exuberant and positively gleeful – a curiously loquacious string of words, which here means, this writer is trying desperately to flatter you and garner your attention.

I am a recent convert to your online service of quality entertainment (and not so quality entertainment – I see you have several Danny Dyer films listed in your inventory, and I am not pleased at all as they are lower than low, but each to their own). I have watched several films on your network, including Filth, The Bicycle Thief and the wonderful Obvious Child, the latter of which I could not find at any HMV, Head or Games Exchange store for several weeks of tireless, frustrated and vain searching. Kudos to you.

Although you did not reply to my letter about saving and recommissioning Utopia, though I suppose that is still an option, I’ve just finished Orange is the New Black and am making a start on Better Call Saul. With such quality TV programmes available, I am sure you are more than chuffed that you, in November, made the excellent announcement that you are creating a 13-part TV series of the popular and important series of books written by Daniel Handler, best known under the alias of Lemony Snicket, collectively referred to as A Series of Unfortunate Events.

What a brilliant move, Netflix! I mean this sincerely – I am aware that as a Brit, any compliment I make sounds flippant and sarcastic and provoking. Again, kudos to you and your magnificent overlords. When the news broke, I jumped for absolute joy – figuratively, not literally, you understand – because I adore the Unfortunate Events series.

I am a bigger fan of the Baudelaire Orphans than I am of Harry Potter and his insanely egotistical magical friends. Snicket’s prose is divine and purposeful, and it taught me a lot about writing style, the importance of a narrative and even how to frame one’s stories, as well as the general naff parts about triumph under adversity, misfortune under adversity, and the fact that the universe is actually quite a rubbish place. My kids, Netflix, should they ever exist, will be reading these books. They have no choice in the matter.

This is why I want to lovingly check in on you and your overlords about some of the choices you are making about the series as a whole. Several months after the announcement we have heard nothing about the casting, directing, creative team, stories, or anything at all in general about where the series is headed.

I am writing this letter to you, Netflix, rather out of the blue, because I am anxious. I am sure you get lots of fanmail already about how much joy you bring to others, but I have recently had the misfortune of experiencing some Unfortunate Events (I am so so so sorry, the pun had to come out sooner or later) with regard to television adapted from my youth.

I don’t know, considering that you are an inanimate object, how acquainted you are with children’s television these days. It is rather, to be frank, shit. It contains this, for example:

And also, s I discovered the other day to my horror, this:

These two photos, Netflix, are all that is wrong with television today. The first photograph is of the new series of Thunderbirds, an ungodly messy abyss of a programme that has somehow been recommissioned. I do not know if Mr Snicket is aware of the original Thunderbirds series, but I can assure you that the puppets made of plastic and string were more lifelike than these dead eyed bastards which make you feel depressed – ironically, the CGI version would not be out of place in an Unfortunate Events novel.

The second photograph wounds me deeper, Netflix, because that is what Peter Rabbit is now. The lovely watercolour Peter Rabbit from my childhood is now a wisecracking twat. Benjamin Bunny wears a beanie hat, Peter rides an electric scooter, and there are American accents everywhere. It is deeply upsetting and confusing, and having loved the books as a little girl, it has made me feel like up is down, left is right and marmite is edible.

I will now enclose a third photo:

This, Netflix, is what is known in the UK as The Clangers. It is a stop-motion TV show featuring knitted creatures from outer space that eat green soup served by dragons. I’m aware that that must sound dismally dull and low-tech to you. But it was aired in the seventies and has a large, fond following, including myself, as I managed to see a few reruns of the show on television growing up. Recently, the BBC (sorry to refer to a rival network!) recommissioned The Clangers.

I have watched some of the new episodes, despite being a grown woman. I am overjoyed with the result. They are thoughtful and lovely. The Knitting Machine” – where Granny Clanger essentially falls prey to the industrial revolution and becomes a Luddite – is surprisingly moving and entertaining. It almost undid all of the curmudgeonly feelings that Peter Rabbit caused. Yes, the remake has brighter colours and smoother animation, but at its heart, something charming exists that was in the original, which I suspect is down to retaining the jerky stop-motion animation style and using the lovely voice of Michael Palin.

But I digress, because A Series of Unfortunate Events are books for everyone aged over roughly eight, not infants learning about musical instruments and nostalgic twenty-something women. The Unfortunate Events are enjoyed by all adults and children alike.

Yet if The Clangers got it right by not messing up the original source material with dated humour and CGI, the demon you must exorcise from your TV series is any mention, reference or resemblance to the rather Unfortunate (there I go again with the puns) 2004 film.

The Unfortunate Events film, suffered immensely from a confusing tone, disjointed, rushed pace, and too much Jim Carrey. Not even the formidable Meryl Streep could save the it. Yes, it did have it had its good moments (the Littlest Elf for example, was a macabre and excellent motif) and I dare say I rather found it funny, at the age of ten, back in the early 2000s when Jim Carrey was relevant.

But “funny” is not the phrase I think of when I think of Snicket’s work. The books have a dark humour to them which I greatly admire, but their overall tone is an exploration of grief and fear. I dearly love to laugh, but I do not want to laugh that much at this series. I want to root for the Baudelaires, I want to be afraid of Olaf, I want to be sincerely sad when life is cruel to the former and good to the latter.

Jim Carrey all but ruined Count Olaf for me. Tim Curry, for example, would have done a better job, having not only narrated the British versions of the books but also proved he can do bone-chillingly frightening as well as funny in a variety of roles. The Jim Carrey overkill, the rushed attempt to explain what VFD is, and the rather tacked on faux-happy ending all spoiled the film immensely. In short, the film tried to be something else entirely to the books, and failed with a soft fizzle and a whimper.

I point to this scene alone as proof:

 

Keep this scene in mind, Netflix overlords, when your creative team storyboards the action sequences of the show. If, at any opportunity, the series borders on this style of humour, please shut down production immediately.  

But overall, I’m begging: please, please, please, do not miss this opportunity to send these books out into the world with a new audience by selling out the darkness for the light. Children are at their best when they are filled with a combination of wonder, empathy and fear, and it is these qualities which the source material created so well. Dinosaur-impersonating Jim Carrey is not what you want your legacy to be.

Yours with fond wishes and greatest respect,

Beth Smith (a loyal fan). 

Swearing, Caring and Oversharing: My Social Media Holiday or Is “Buzzfeed” an Insult?

Dire Warning: Massively big post of dubious quality ahead.  I’d also like to take the opportunity apologise for that unbearable headline, but now I’ve done it I can’t bear to get rid of it.

Today, I was going to tweet something but I couldn’t. This is a good thing.

I was on Netflix, which I have only recently acquired (read: found out my brother’s password and lovingly stolen, as good siblings do). Scrolling through its films I saw a duo of Danny Bloody Dyer movies. One of the films was Run For Your Wife, which is a sin against cinema, a sin against punning and above all a sin against the Church of Wittertainment.

But it does make for an exellent Kermodian rant:

The other film was The Altogether, a film which breaks my heart by its very existence because Martin Freeman is in it. Martin Bloody Freeman is in it.

Martin “I am both Watson and Bilbo and that guy from the original UK Office whose name Bethan can’t remember but is Jim in the US version” Freeman, whose appearance even in Ali G Indahouse, of all things, is gold. Dyer and Freeman is like combining the best and worst of British, a deliciously delicate sweet pie pastry with past-their-use-by-date rotten jellied eels as its unfortunate filling. 

I was going to tweet something remotely outraged in a comedic fashion about this unholy matrimony of actors. The tweet probably wouldn’t have got any favourites or any attention because most of my tweets just clutter the cosmic internet void. But still. A nice tweet it would have been. The sort of tweet I like tweeting. A shiny tweet in the landfill of twitter, which one hapless follower-come-magpie may have favourited out of pity.

But I did not post anything about Danny Dyer, or The Altogether, or even the fact that The Bicycle Thieves, a beautiful classic film of unbridled joy which you should see, is also on Netflix. I am not allowed for the next few days, at least, to tweet anything at all. Or Facebook anything all. Or even take a photo of my outraged, heartbroken face and post that to Instagram.

I have put myself on a self-imposed exile of not Saying Stuff On Social Media², for My Own Good. This is a Big Deal. Saying Stuff is very important to me. Saying Stuff on Social Media how I connect with quite a few people. Not Saying Stuff on Social Media means I’m basically on my own with my thoughts for a while now. Which at least a bit weird, if not also a bit sad.

This self-imposed social media exile began in spirit two days ago, when I genuinely wondered whether or not to livetweet my period. (For context, #LivetweetYourPeriod is a thing, I am not making it up, it is exactly what you think it is and here is an article about why it is quite a good thing because this post is, in internet terms, already the length of War and Peace.) I thought that it would provide some general comic relief when shark week next comes around. I thought about it. And then thought some more. Then it became a thing that I had a small crisis and a sleepless night over. A Sleepless Night. What began as a joke elevated to a more fundamental “how do I present myself on the internet and how do my friends and acquaintances see me as a person and am I okay with that?” kind of thing.

That’s right, folks. I’m officially reaching the clichéd “graduate panicking about stuff they don’t need to panic about and then writing about it” level of shite blog. Considering I’ve already posted about being single, all I need to do is post about my lack of employment possibilities and how I’ll probably never become what I wanted to be growing up (a crime-fighting ballerina novelist) and I can shout BINGO!, get a full house, and presumably leave the hall of twenty-somethings with a jobseeker's allowance.

Anyway. I was in two minds over whether to tweet about menstruating. It went a little something like this:

Introducing a METAPHORICAL INTERLUDE! 

Presenting BETHAN’S TWO-MINDEDNESS: AN ILLUSTRATED DIALOGUE featuring the fictional constructs of Bethan-Dee and Bethan-Dum¹

BETHAN-DEE: Maybe we should? It will be all political and stuff. I’ve got some cracking yet poignant jokes about the cost of sanitary pads.

BETHAN-DUM: Well, I don’t think anyone wants to know about that, tbh. Regardless of its political associations and potential to be a humour goldmine, menstruation remains a taboo subject. It probably won’t be received well. Don’t you remember all of Beth’s exes? The guys that were supposed to be most intimately acquainted and interested in the contents her underpants disliked openly discussing the notion of her uterus lining being shed. Even on good days. What would a potential employer, casual acquaintance or future partner make of such behaviour?

B-DEE: Maybe that could be an acid test. We’ll give them a checklist. “Are you comfortable with Bethan discussing her rubbish periods in either online or paper-based or live-discussion form? If no, then maybe we need to reconsider our professional and/or personal relationship.

B-DUM: Beggars can’t be choosers. But it doesn’t matter now. Now everyone reading this blog is just thinking about it anyway. About “it”. Bethan’s friends, Bethan’s online acquaintances, and potentially strangers who live across the pond, are now thinking about “it.” Well done us. *slowclap*.

B-DEE: What, you mean her lady garden?

B-DUM: Specifically a bleeding vagina, yes. That belongs to a specific person the reader of this blog might actually have already met or might meet in the future. Shit me, we’re dumb.

B-DEE: Well, now we’re swearing, right? Doesn’t that quite negate the idea of menstruation as overshare? If her employer sees that she occasionally uses “colourful” language on the internet, however well-placed in an intentionally humorous the context, won’t she get fail to be employed anyway regardless of the state of her vag? Should we panic about that?

B-DUM: Shut the fuck up, you cockwomble.

I have always had a turbulent relationship with how I present myself both in real life and on the internet. I think there is both a unifying theme and a disconnect between the two. Unifying, in that I always strive to be open, easy-going, somewhat sarcastic, fluent and friendly. Disconnected in that, like most people, I exaggerate on the internet where I don't in real life and have the potential to come across as being a virtual flippant oversharer.

I do not know if this attempt at a casual voice online is a Good Thing or a Shit Thing. It has been this way for years and I still don’t know how to think of it. A few months ago, for instance, on a blog that may or may not still actually be live, I was a blogger famed among my fellow-colleagues for my weird, flippant tone. I asked my then boyfriend to read an article I had written about, above all things, the sensitive topic of abortion.

His reaction? “It’s very… Buzzfeed. Yeah. It’s very Buzzfeed. I could imagine you writing for Buzzfeed”. I did not know whether to punch the air for joy or punch him in the face.

I have nothing against Buzzfeed. In fact, I quite love it. Every morning, even before I check my social media notifications, I have a routine where I look at the guardian headlines, then BBC news, then I’ll check Buzzfeed. But "debate on abortion" and "cat video" do not go easily together. Is a “Buzzfeed” style a compliment or a curse? On the one hand you've got pretty much every article Daniel Dalton has written, on the other this.

Does a “Buzzfeed” mentality mean I have a tendency to write relatable and accessable and entertaining posts, something I like the idea of, or that I just spam banal stuff and get a kick out of getting any old reaction or a view? Am I a narcissist? I’ll take a picture of a seagull at a beach and post it on Instagram, and genuinely – genuinely – get a little kick if someone likes it, regardless of what time of day it is or what I’m doing. Is that sad? 

I hope it isn’t sad. But I’m increasingly worrying that people view me as someone who is lived and defined by her online statuses. A month or so ago a friend I hadn’t seen in a while introduce himself to me by immediately saying “I saw what you posted on Facebook the other day! It made me laugh.” A friend I have only met twice in real life and, having left uni, might realistically never meet again, on finding out I’m quitting social media for a while, commented  “miss you already!”. Whether or not both of these encounters were sarcastic or genuine – it’s always hard to tell if people are pisstaking on the internet – people are starting to define me by the words I post on the internet.

This makes me wonder if I’m becoming a virtual construct. Even my dearest friends that I talk to regularly on Facebook messenger; I can’t help but think, will I ever see you in real life again? Because if not, then I really need to get my online shit together. I’m wondering if spamming links to Buzzfeed articles is really how I want people to remember me. I worry sometimes that, like that episode of Charlie Brooker’s magnificent Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" if I came back as a robot made up of my social media profiles, I’d be a combination of links to Earth, Wind and Fire songs, sweary and incoherent political rants, and tweets demanding that the Penguin in the Christmas John Lewis ad be called Keith Chegwin. Who’d want to have a pint with that woman, really?

                                  

   Well, *I* enjoy drinking and dancing to Earth, Wind and Fire. I'd like to think I'm crazy great after a few glasses of wine and their greatest hits album. 'Cause if you don't dance and if you don't dance then you're no friend of mine.

But I still reckon that’s what I am. I think this little gap in posting stuff is less me altering myself, more accepting that my online persona is who it is, and will continue to be so. I am not going to be a verbally interesting, quiet person who makes only the occasional but profound comment like a small smug part of me wants to be. I am a woman made of my many rambly words. Some of those words stick and others don't.

It’s a little like accepting you have a weird shaped nose or a crap laugh or a birthmark, all three of which I incidentally have, so I know what I’m talking about here. Unless you have some kind of magic surgery, you cannot permanently change that. You've just got to deal with it. I am a hybrid of unbearably awkward in real life and overly verbose on the internet. That is fine. I am okay with this.

I think the people who like flesh-and-blood me are special, because if you’ve ever had the misfortune to meet me in real life, I am quite shit. At the pub, like most idiots, I sometimes think I’m Oscar Wilde or Tina Fey when I’m actually Mr Collins from Pride and Prejudice³. Which means that if you meet me in real life on a regular basis, you have accepted me as your Mr Collins friend, and I love you dearly for it. On the internet, however I feel more at ease, I like words and communicating, I feel happy when I post the odd joke or jab or buzzfeed link and, whether I like it or not (and moreover, whether it gets any likes or not), it tends to go down a little more easily.

Unlike this long, rambly and desperately odd piece of flub blogging which will probably be deleted in embarrassment once I resume life in the twitter, Facebook and Instagram-verse. Now that that’s off my chest, once I've had a little think about it, let’s get back to posting inane stuff on all corners of the internet.

But seriously though – Dyer and Freeman? In a film together? What a bloody mess. More of a bloody mess than the second day of my period. Amirite? Ha ha ha. *Ba-Dum-Tssh*

¹For context, I was originally going to virtually stage a three-way argument between my Id, Ego and Superego, but felt that you, reader of this blog, might statistically be more acquainted with Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. If I’ve insulted your intelligence, allow me to say, from the bottom of my heart: soz. If you don’t know either the three-part psychological model of the psyche or who Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum are, I’d recommend reading Carroll over Freud.

² This blog, as far as I’m concerned, is not social media. It’s more like a shit diary and a crap hobby, all rolled into one shite package you are inexplicably reading.

³My apologies to the die-hards out there who will inevitably be angry that I have linked here to the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and not the vastly superior BBC TV series adaptation of P&P. Tom Hollander (**not** New Spiderman Tom Holland) is, however, equally brilliant as a Mr Collins as David Bamber is, and I will not hear otherwise.