Netflix - what did you do to Anne Shirley?
****Possible spoilers ahead****
It's as if the screenwriter opened up Anne of Green Gables and sucked every bit of joy and humor out of it. Then, left with 320 minutes to go, she filled it with joyless, humorless, plot lines full of melodrama and angst that hardly resembles the wonderful book written by L.M. Montgomery.
This was an Anne of Green Gables with:
No green hair
No acting out Lancelot and Elaine on the Lake
No "chrysanthemum"
No walking on the ridgepole of the Barry's roof
No mouse in the plum pudding
No Miss Stacy
No performing at the White Sand Hotel
No Queen's Academy
No Avery Scholarship
I kept watching, episode after episode, hoping it would get better. Hoping it would capture some of the joy and humor of the book, but by the time I got to the last episode I was just so disappointed.
The four lead actors playing Anne, Marilla, Matthew and Gilbert were good. If they had been given a screenplay that actually allowed them to play those characters, I'm sure I would have liked them better. The rest of the cast was okay, but sort of nondescript. There were no stand-out performances.
It would have been nice to see more of the beauty of Prince Edward Island, but, because this was a joyless adaptation, of course we can't show that. It would go against the tone the screenwriter was trying to create. The opening shot was lovely, but that was about it.
It ended on a cliffhanger, so I'm assuming there will be another season. But based on that cliffhanger, I'm betting the second season won't have any of the above plot lines in it, because the tone of the cliffhanger does not lend itself to a show that includes any of that. That cliffhanger puts it on a path to become a show about a girl who lives on Prince Edward Island named Anne (with an "E"), and probably that's the only thing it will have in common with Anne of Green Gables.
So, suffice it to say, I guess I should be glad they didn't call it Anne of Green Gables, because it wasn't.
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