When you embark on the opening episode of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the first words you hear are a genuine piece of advice — “Look away.”

I wouldn’t listen to it.

This adaptation of Daniel Handler’s (who wrote under the pen name Lemony Snicket) creative novel series should not work in a visual medium, yet it does beautifully. The show embodies each quirk and absurdity of the books, bringing them to life in a way that Brad Silberling’s film based on the same series failed to.

Lemony Snicket, the books’ fourth-wall-breaking author, plays the role of a film noir style omniscient narrator, portrayed by Patrick Warburton. This unique storytelling style can be startling at first, but his whimsical monologues soon become endearing.

Where Snicket is smooth-talking and amicable, the story’s antagonist Count Olaf is effectively bumbling and abrasive. Neil Patrick Harris is made up so well that you can barely tell it’s him at times, but his execution of one of the most dastardly villains a child will ever read truly embodies the tone of the series.

It would be irresponsible to go any further without saluting the performances of three (but really only two) protagonists, Violet and Klaus Baudelaire. I omit Sunny simply because the infant who portrays her doesn’t necessarily display any acting chops. Malina Weissman and Louis Hynes, playing Violet and Klaus respectively, make you care for these destitute orphans even more. Watching Weissman silently cry when being confronted by Olaf or watching Hynes take physical abuse is painful — but what is truly inspiring is their resolution to go on fighting their ludicrous battles.

Instead of taking this preposterous story and making it real, this show makes the folly and farce feel stylistically at home. This is where so many book adaptations fall short — they try to make sense out of madness. Madness that works better in the imaginative mind of a child than on a screen with human actors.

Some remnants of this dilemma are shown through scenes with Sunny, a main character who is an infant and communicates with the audience via green subtitles and sounds that don’t match up with her mouth. But these instances are few and far between because this show allows the farcical story to tell itself without the burden of considering what is realistic.

The first season, which is available on Netflix, covers four books, and each book gets two episodes averaging around 50 minutes. The result is a show that uses every scene wisely, so never avert your eyes from the screen. A great mystery is unfolding that manages to give more questions than answers after each episode, if you’ll pardon my cliché.

Anyone who has closely read the books will notice the differences between the show and the book, but I can’t imagine you’ll care. Most of the changes seemed to be successful gambles that bring the show more drama and intrigue.

For a show that foreshadows with painstaking clarity, it can be incredibly cryptic. Confusion threatens to overtake the viewer like a dense fog, somehow growing thicker with each new revelation, yet we know how these stories go.

A Series of Unfortunate Events offers a surprisingly fresh take on a story that has been fully explored, with its own set of twists. The actors are not terrifying themselves, but certain scenes will make you squirm in your seat with discomfort. It is difficult to reconcile why a show ripe with sadness is so watchable, because the dry wit of the writing shouldn’t offset the show’s depressing events.

Somehow, we’ve been convinced to watch this set of adverse occurrences. But it’s all worth it, I promise.

3.5 shells