It’s always a shame when a spectacular work comes to an end.

As a huge fan of A Series of Unfortunate Events, a 13-part chronicle of the lives of the plucky Baudelaire orphans and their plight against the villainous Count Olaf, I long hoped for more material to come of the series. The 2004 movie was a bust, and quite turned me off Jim Carrey as a side effect, so I was desperate for something, anything to surface on the matter.

And has something, anything fallen into my lap since!

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Netflix’s television adaptation of the series in June of 2015, I was hooked. (Note: Netflix hasn’t officially stated whether or not they made that trailer, but that’s not something I wish to get hung up about at the moment.) I became more enthralled as the minutiae of the show slowly trickled out of production. Daniel Handler, the writer of the series under the pen name Lemony Snicket, was slated to be a screenwriter for the show, which did nothing to quell my excitement.

It was a long year and a half to wait, but I easily passed the time by ticking off each passing day in attempt to make time move faster. Finally, on January 13, 2017, season one of the series, containing eight episodes encapsulating the first four books, were released worldwide.

And I wish I had enjoyed it more.

Okay, to be fair, there are some aspects of the series that I quite appreciate, the primary example being its aesthetic. All the visual aspects of the show are magnificent, capturing perfectly the drab, melancholy feel of the books. The visuals also work to exaggerate the anachronisms of the series (in this case, referencing how certain objects, such as blacksmiths and computers, exist at the same time, despite being wildly different from a temporal point of view), a recurring joke from the books that I’m glad they translated onto the screen.

The negatives, however, stick out to me like nine sore toes (again, an exaggeration), so the farther I watch into the show the sadder I become.

First, the show has removed many of the genuinely dark aspects of the books to make room for awkwardly spaced humor that doesn’t really fit with the rest of the plot. Even though the show was meant to appeal to wider audiences than the books did, prompting a slight change in mood, the strange lapses in this field aren’t comfortable for any viewers.

Additionally, the show has removed entirely the tremendous mystery element that the books spent years slowly unravelling. What began as sly winks to the readers from Snicket regarding a secret organization around which the entire plot revolves has devolved into a lecture covering every obscure detail of the matter. To know that this organization was originally only mentioned by name starting in the fifth book of the series is downright frustrating to me.

To add insult to injury, the TV series constantly makes not-to-subtle nods to the future plot points; Snicket, embodied by the dour baritone of Patrick Warburton, appears regularly to provide narration in a number of locations, the most notable being a system of interconnected underground passageways with directions to the houses of various families described much later in the series by the books. The attempts by the series to emulate Snicket’s subtlety from the books is just plain wrong to see.