What Have They Done To The Durrells?

One of the best things my mother ever did for me was to introduce me to Gerald Durrell's writing. Durrell was a British naturalist who spent part of his childhood in the 1903s on Corfu with his mother and siblings. His books about that time (My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, and Fauna and Family) are hilarious, and I can remember knowing that my mother was reading one of his books when she could barely get through a paragraph without giggling. Despite seeing his brother Lawrence as a better writer, Gerry certainly knew how to hold a reader's attention.

When I stumbled across My Family and Other Animals, the 2005 movie based on his books, I was wary. Movie adaptations of books can sometimes go dreadfully awry, especially when one has grown up with a beloved set of books and has a fairly firm notion of what they ought to look like acted out. I was pleasantly surprised -- the movie trims down the story to fit the allotted time, but it does so with care and affection for both the characters and the general feel of the books. There are little bits of serious drama in with the wackiness, just to remind you that it's the '30s in Europe and bad things are happening, but for the most part, the movie keeps it light and fun, which is why it now sits in my DVD collection.

Today I discovered that there's been a more recent adaptation that's now on Amazon Prime Video -- a four-season series that, one would think, would really get into the details in the books and bring Gerry's wit to the fore.

No such luck, sadly. I'm a few episodes in, and it seems the producers have seen fit to turn it into a heart-wrenching drama rather than a light-hearted comedy. They're skipping a lot of the good bits, giving the characters far more flaws than they deserve, and the whole thing is feeling unhappy and rushed. It's rather like what Netflix did in Anne With An E -- taking a beloved childhood classic and making it dark and full of angst.

I'm going to stick with the series a bit longer in the hopes that it gets better, but I don't think I'd put money on it. I do want to know, with the writers skipping great chunks of the storyline, how they've filled four seasons from three books that they seem to be racing to bypass entirely. We shall see, I suppose.