parlando

preliminary thoughts on jeeves and wooster

Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Comedy.

We have only watched the first two episodes, and it's not unusual for a comedy series to take even a full season to get its legs. So I'm certainly not writing off the series with these remarks. But for a purchase that seemed like a can't-miss -- Jeeves and Wooster played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie! adapted from the actual stories! -- I'm getting an uneasy feeling that I may end up watching more from duty than enjoyment.

Overfamiliarity with the original material is never a good recipe for enjoying stories transfered to television or cinema, and I'm obsessively fond of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I knew from the start that one key element in the humor -- Bertie's narrative voice -- was unlilkely to translate, so I was prepared to let that go. All I really want is a reasonable approximation of the tone. And they've largely managed that. But they've managed it far better in the sequences when they're lifting dialogue whole from the original; rewritten scenes tend to miss a little, and the scenes created entirely new have been weak. And unfortunately, this means the best scenes have been the ones where I already knew all the jokes and incidents. (Not their fault.)

Some of the portrayals are better than others. I gather one of the odd features of the series is that the actors playing the supporting characters change from season to season; but in these first two episodes, at least, Bingo Little is perfect, and Roberta Wickham, Sir Roderick Glossop, Aunt Agatha, Honoria Glossop, and Claude and Eustace are all good enough. The imbecility of the Drones Club is perhaps played a bit broadly. Aunt Dahlia is badly underplayed, which is too bad, since she's my favorite supporting character in the series, and ought to be the most loudly and enthusiastically played. Hugh Laurie is a fine Bertie.

Which brings us to the huge problem that may well ruin the series for me: Stephen Fry's Jeeves. Fry is a very funny man, and I've always enjoyed him before. And I don't doubt that what he's doing here is funny. But it's not Jeeves, and I'm going to have a lot of trouble moving past that. Fry's Jeeves is smug. He wears a perpetual smirk, and radiates an air of superiority. Now, Jeeves as written would be hard to play for a funny man. Jeeves is largely expressionless and unreacting; the humor proceeds from the barest variations in his manner and tone. His verbal humor is as bone-dry as humor gets. Instead, Fry (and the writers) have turned up the volume, making Jeeves both more obvious and less likeable. He strikes me as more of a stand-in for a modern audience's class sensibilities than a real attempt to portray Jeeves as written, a failure of interpretation which unfortunately doesn't just affect Jeeves but the tone of the whole enterprise. Orwell noted that Americans who read a class critique in the Jeeves and Wooster stories were missing the point, but in this case they wouldn't be far off. Worst of all for the tone, they have made Jeeves sarcastic. Fry's Jeeves scores points with cutting remarks off Bertie's stupidity -- and that of his friends -- in a way that is simply cruder -- lower -- than Jeeves would ever stoop to. All of these smartass remarks are original to the television series, and, alas, none of them (so far) have been especially clever or funny: conventional put-down humor that sails over the head of the target. The literary Jeeves's dry remarks may contain implications, but he is not so baldly disrespectful, ever.

So, well. I'll continue watching, and at the very least look for my favorite segments. The singing of "Sonny Boy" was well done; I'm eager to see what they do with Gussie Fink-Nottle's address to the graduates. But I no longer have much hope that I'm going to love this series, and that's too bad, because my hopes were very high.

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