In the course of the first season, which covers the first four books in the series, the children are entrusted into the care of a string of adults, while Count Olaf, a villainous actor played with wonderful campiness by Neil Patrick Harris, plots to assume the children’s guardianship and steal their inherited fortune. When the TV series opens, the Baudelaire siblings, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny (Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, and Presley Smith), are abruptly informed that their parents have perished in a mysterious fire, leaving them with a fortune they cannot use until they come of age. In an era of “fake news”-of the proliferation of stories we should know better than to believe-“A Series” provides a welcome, if unsettling, indictment of those who are programmed to shield themselves from difficult truths and fall back, instead, on comforting lies.

But much more than the previous adaptation of Handler’s books-a film version from 2004, starring Jim Carrey, which lightened the tone of the books almost beyond recognition_-_the series embraces its source material’s dark, more violent fictional world. The story is, on the one hand, as Sonnenfeld has put it, about how “all children are capable and all adults are horrible.” But, more than that, it’s about resisting the impulse to reassure young viewers that everything will be O.K. “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off somewhere else,” Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton), the alter ego of the children’s author Daniel Handler, warns at the outset of Netflix’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” The new show, faithfully adapted by Barry Sonnenfeld from Handler’s popular series of novels, has the familiar structure and feel of an uplifting children’s story: three resourceful orphans struggle to escape the machinations of an evil and greedy count.

Lemony snicket series