Based on Bill Duke's direction of the pilot THE GOLDEN SPIDERS, I had very high hopes for this series. Oscar winner Timothy Hutton promised to be a superb Archie Goodwin, and while Maury Chaykin's Nero Wolfe tended towards peevish rather than lordly the period detail and fidelity to Stout's novels more than made up for that. Then - the show went to series...and was a profound disappointment.
Hutton's Archie, so pitch-perfect in the pilot, became a broad cartoon when the show went to series - as did so much else. Maybe it was the tighter budget for the series, but Fifties New York seemed to shrink to a handful of tightly-photographed exteriors and a number of repeated interiors, the direction and music seemed to discourage any form of real stakes in the murder mysteries, and while the Repertory company casting may have been a great idea on paper it played Hell with suspension of disbelief. Chaykin's Wolfe never really grew on me as he continued to lack the *gravitas* and sense of both justice and manners the character needed to become more than a spoiled overweight misanthropic agoraphobe - though to be fair, nobody's really gotten Nero Wolfe right yet (Thayer David in the Seventies THE DOORBELL RANG came closest).
I keep hoping somebody will do Wolfe and Archie right - while this started out close to it, it ended up making a hash of the stories I've loved pretty much my whole life.
Hutton's Archie, so pitch-perfect in the pilot, became a broad cartoon when the show went to series - as did so much else. Maybe it was the tighter budget for the series, but Fifties New York seemed to shrink to a handful of tightly-photographed exteriors and a number of repeated interiors, the direction and music seemed to discourage any form of real stakes in the murder mysteries, and while the Repertory company casting may have been a great idea on paper it played Hell with suspension of disbelief. Chaykin's Wolfe never really grew on me as he continued to lack the *gravitas* and sense of both justice and manners the character needed to become more than a spoiled overweight misanthropic agoraphobe - though to be fair, nobody's really gotten Nero Wolfe right yet (Thayer David in the Seventies THE DOORBELL RANG came closest).
I keep hoping somebody will do Wolfe and Archie right - while this started out close to it, it ended up making a hash of the stories I've loved pretty much my whole life.