Post by Salzmank on Dec 17, 2021 4:24:23 GMT
“Christmas Party,” A Nero Wolfe Mystery, S1:E9.
Lots of people love this show. I should be one of them—I love old mysteries, old New York atmosphere, and the 1940s and like the Nero Wolfe characters—but… I dunno. I find so many episodes just so dull.
Part of the reason is that source-material author Rex Stout’s plots were generally weak; a few of the Wolfe novels and novellas have strong plots (Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, and “Black Orchids” spring to mind), but in general Stout was one of the weakest puzzle-plotters of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction (roughly ’20s-late ’40s).
Stout’s real strength was his dialogue, his witty repartee, and unfortunately many of the Nero Wolfe Mystery scripts lose that dialogue. Maury Chaykin, as Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton, as Archie Goodwin, give decent performances but don’t really look (and, in Chaykin’s case, sound) like the Stout characters. The supporting casts tend to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bad.
And the episodes are just so blandly filmed, making a high-budgeted show look cheap. “Christmas Party,” the episode I watched tonight, exemplifies all of these flaws.
Still, I keep watching from time to time in the hopes that I’ll see an episode I wholeheartedly like!
Lots of people love this show. I should be one of them—I love old mysteries, old New York atmosphere, and the 1940s and like the Nero Wolfe characters—but… I dunno. I find so many episodes just so dull.
Part of the reason is that source-material author Rex Stout’s plots were generally weak; a few of the Wolfe novels and novellas have strong plots (Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, and “Black Orchids” spring to mind), but in general Stout was one of the weakest puzzle-plotters of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction (roughly ’20s-late ’40s).
Stout’s real strength was his dialogue, his witty repartee, and unfortunately many of the Nero Wolfe Mystery scripts lose that dialogue. Maury Chaykin, as Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton, as Archie Goodwin, give decent performances but don’t really look (and, in Chaykin’s case, sound) like the Stout characters. The supporting casts tend to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bad.
And the episodes are just so blandly filmed, making a high-budgeted show look cheap. “Christmas Party,” the episode I watched tonight, exemplifies all of these flaws.
Still, I keep watching from time to time in the hopes that I’ll see an episode I wholeheartedly like!