A Nero as Hero. - "Nero Wolfe" - television program review

National Review, August 12, 2002 by Terry Teachout

Some cable networks are destinations, others way stations. Arts & Entertainment has long been one of the latter, a vaguely defined middlebrow enterprise across which one occasionally stumbles while channel-surfing. I've seen Biography, its best-known series, a couple of dozen times, but never deliberately -- only in passing, usually when I'm killing time in a hotel room and can't find anything better to watch. Hence it is with no small amount of surprise that I now find myself tuning in A&E every Sunday night to keep up with the doings of a monstrously fat private detective who swills beer by the case, fusses over his thrice-daily gourmet meals, dresses in sunflower-yellow shirts, and grows orchids in a greenhouse on the roof of his Manhattan brownstone, whose threshold he crosses only when compelled by the threat of impending arrest.

Older readers will need no further introduction to Nero Wolfe, the larger-than-life hero of 73 novels and novellas written by Rex Stout between 1934 and his death in 1975. For most of his long life, Stout was acclaimed as one of America's best mystery writers -- even Edmund Wilson, who despised the genre, grudgingly admitted that he "rather enjoyed" Wolfe -- and though his star has faded a bit in recent years, paperback editions of his books are still kept in print on a rotating basis by Bantam.

A half-dozen prior attempts have been made to bring Wolfe to TV, radio, and the movies, and all have failed dismally. Not so A&E's Nero Wolfe. It isn't perfect, but it comes close, in part for the simplest of reasons: Timothy Hutton and Michael Jaffe, the executive producers, have chosen to stick as closely as possible to the source. Each episode is based on a Stout story (the novels are done as two-parters, the novellas in single hour-long episodes). The plots are left intact, and large chunks of dialogue are lifted straight off the page. If you've read Death of a Doxy, Too Many Clients, or The Mother Hunt, you won't find anything surprising about the A&E versions.

To be sure, faithfulness to the original is no guarantee of success when translating a familiar novel to the screen. More often than not, literal adaptations are redundant at best (why bother?), maladroit at worst. Novels aren't meant to be played out in real time, and even when the action is scrupulously compressed, you still have to find actors and actresses capable of fitting the preconceptions of viewers who've already read the book. As a general rule, the better bet is to treat the source material as a point of departure -- the way Amy Heckerling did when she turned Jane Austen's Emma into Clueless -- rather than following it slavishly, but that approach is impossible when the novel in question is a cult classic. Rex Stout fans want to know exactly what the brownstone on West 35th Street "really" looks like, though they expect it to bear a close resemblance to the one in their heads, just as they have the strongest possible opinions about what Nero Wolfe looks and sounds like, not to mention Archie Goodwin, his wisecracking assistant, and all the other inhabitants of Stout's elaborate imaginary world. That's an awful lot of experts to please.

That Nero Wolfe should be so pleasing has at least as much to do with the casting as the scripts. In addition to co-producing the series and directing several episodes, Timothy Hutton plays Archie Goodwin, and I can't see how anyone could do a better job. Not only does he catch Archie's snap-brim Thirties tone with sharp-eared precision, but he also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the dapper detective- narrator I've been envisioning all these years. No sooner did Hutton make his first entrance in The Golden Spiders than he melded completely with the Archie of my mind's eye. I can no longer read a Stout novel without seeing him, or hearing his voice.

Still, Archie could have wandered out of any number of screwball comedies; Nero Wolfe is a far more complicated proposition. Weighing in at a seventh of a ton, he is a tireless talker endowed with a touch of Johnsonian genius. (It is no small tribute to Stout's own brainpower that he was capable of making that characterization plausible.) At the same time, he is chronically lazy and neurotic to the highest degree, so much so that he refuses to leave his home on business, preferring to sit at his desk or tend his orchids. Like Sherlock Holmes, the predecessor on whom he was obviously modeled, Wolfe is a misogynist who will have nothing to do with women socially -- food, not sex, is his sensual outlet -- though every once in a while he gives off a faint but perceptible flicker of interest in one of the pretty ladies who pass through his office.

Maury Chaykin has doubtless immersed himself in the Wolfe novels, for he brings to his interpretation of the part both a detailed knowledge of what Stout wrote and an unexpectedly personal touch of insight. He plays Wolfe as a fearful genius, an aesthete turned hermit who has withdrawn from the world (and from the opposite sex) in order to shield himself -- against what? Stout never answers that question, giving Chaykin plenty of room to maneuver, which he uses with enviable skill. His Nero Wolfe is gluttonous, blustery, petulant, even a bit dandyish - - but he peers out at his clients through the haunted eyes of a man whwho knows too much.