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Anne with an E
Jul. 22nd, 2018 08:56 amI watched the first episode of the Netflix series Anne with an E and I have decided to do my blood pressure a favor and not watch any more, because I disagree with essentially all of their decisions, starting with the fact that they’ve added two years to Anne’s age (she’s eleven! Not thirteen! ELEVEN!) - but really that pales beside the fact that they end the first episode with Marilla sending Anne back to the asylum because she thinks Anne stole her amethyst brooch.
Marilla would NEVER. The amethyst brooch incident does occur in the book, but Anne’s punishment is to miss the Sunday school picnic. Marilla doesn’t even consider sending her back to the asylum! (And then it turns out Anne didn’t steal the brooch and she gets to go to the picnic after all.) This is a character assassination.
Other things I didn’t like (I’m really sorry if one of you loved this show, I super hated it, maybe you should not read this review, it seems to be super popular with people who are not me):
Why the hell is Anne in her underwear in the scene where she shouts at Rachel Lynde? (I understand the in-story reason; I don’t understand why the director decided to film the scene this way.) Why does she flee outdoors in her underwear, and then stay away for hours and hours? I realize that Anne’s underwear looks like a complete set of clothes to a modern viewer, but they super were not, and it’s bizarre to me that Matthew and Marilla aren’t concerned about it and Rachel Lynde doesn’t comment on it.
The creators evidently felt that Anne’s childhood as described (“a life of poverty and drudgery and neglect”) wasn’t bad enough and threw in a lot of extra child abuse. I thought this was all gratuitous and particularly loathed the scene where Anne’s fellow orphans torment her by waving a dead mouse in her face, partly because it’s so gross, but also because it led to them cutting one of the best lines in the book: “I am well in body although considerably rumpled in spirit,” she tells Mrs. Barry the first time they meet.
The mouse flashback leads into Anne assuring Marilla that she’ll be “as quiet as a mouse” when they meet the Barrys, you see. She stands in front of Mrs. Barry in a paralyzed silence, convinced that she’ll make a bad impression if she opens her mouth. Diana actually asks if Anne is shy.
Anne Shirley is one of the great chatterboxes of literature. Why would you mute her like this? Why?
And let’s note that this is another change that makes a character look worse than she is in order to make Anne look good: in the book, Mrs. Barry is fine with Anne becoming friends with Diana despite this startling speech. This is annoying both in itself, but even moreso because it shows that the showrunners lack faith in Anne: they evidently don’t think Anne is good enough to win over audiences on her own without making everyone else awful.
If they don’t have faith in Anne Shirley’s ability to win over viewers and carry the story on her own, maybe they should have… adapted something else. Please. Anything else! (I take it back; I’m not going to monkey’s-paw myself. They are not allowed to get their grubby hands on Emily of New Moon.)
In a similar vein, I’m super annoyed to discover that in the second season they’ve decided to give Gilbert his own personal plotline. Was it just too much to let a female character to have her own TV show all to herself?
And! And! I have also discovered (by dint of Googling Anne with an E in hopes of finding someone else who hates it as much as I do) that they’ve decided to make Mr. Phillips gay. Mr. Phillips, Anne’s teacher, whose main character trait in the books is courting sixteen-year-old Prissy Andrews so assiduously during school hours that he neglects all his other pupils.
Now I can understand why they didn’t want to fling themselves on that super creepy narrative grenade, but nonetheless it means that “Mr. Phillips is secretly gay!” is a bizarre reading totally at odds with the narrative and shows how little respect they have for the book. Like, if you want to have a secretly gay character, Matthew is right there.
I mean you could also argue that Matthew might well be asexual, but that almost certainly would not get the shocked, shocked! reactions that the creators are clearly yearning for, whereas secretly gay totally would. So.
I have more complaints - I could honestly go on about this almost indefinitely - but I’m going to cut myself off before my head explodes. How could they get literally everything so wrong?
Marilla would NEVER. The amethyst brooch incident does occur in the book, but Anne’s punishment is to miss the Sunday school picnic. Marilla doesn’t even consider sending her back to the asylum! (And then it turns out Anne didn’t steal the brooch and she gets to go to the picnic after all.) This is a character assassination.
Other things I didn’t like (I’m really sorry if one of you loved this show, I super hated it, maybe you should not read this review, it seems to be super popular with people who are not me):
Why the hell is Anne in her underwear in the scene where she shouts at Rachel Lynde? (I understand the in-story reason; I don’t understand why the director decided to film the scene this way.) Why does she flee outdoors in her underwear, and then stay away for hours and hours? I realize that Anne’s underwear looks like a complete set of clothes to a modern viewer, but they super were not, and it’s bizarre to me that Matthew and Marilla aren’t concerned about it and Rachel Lynde doesn’t comment on it.
The creators evidently felt that Anne’s childhood as described (“a life of poverty and drudgery and neglect”) wasn’t bad enough and threw in a lot of extra child abuse. I thought this was all gratuitous and particularly loathed the scene where Anne’s fellow orphans torment her by waving a dead mouse in her face, partly because it’s so gross, but also because it led to them cutting one of the best lines in the book: “I am well in body although considerably rumpled in spirit,” she tells Mrs. Barry the first time they meet.
The mouse flashback leads into Anne assuring Marilla that she’ll be “as quiet as a mouse” when they meet the Barrys, you see. She stands in front of Mrs. Barry in a paralyzed silence, convinced that she’ll make a bad impression if she opens her mouth. Diana actually asks if Anne is shy.
Anne Shirley is one of the great chatterboxes of literature. Why would you mute her like this? Why?
And let’s note that this is another change that makes a character look worse than she is in order to make Anne look good: in the book, Mrs. Barry is fine with Anne becoming friends with Diana despite this startling speech. This is annoying both in itself, but even moreso because it shows that the showrunners lack faith in Anne: they evidently don’t think Anne is good enough to win over audiences on her own without making everyone else awful.
If they don’t have faith in Anne Shirley’s ability to win over viewers and carry the story on her own, maybe they should have… adapted something else. Please. Anything else! (I take it back; I’m not going to monkey’s-paw myself. They are not allowed to get their grubby hands on Emily of New Moon.)
In a similar vein, I’m super annoyed to discover that in the second season they’ve decided to give Gilbert his own personal plotline. Was it just too much to let a female character to have her own TV show all to herself?
And! And! I have also discovered (by dint of Googling Anne with an E in hopes of finding someone else who hates it as much as I do) that they’ve decided to make Mr. Phillips gay. Mr. Phillips, Anne’s teacher, whose main character trait in the books is courting sixteen-year-old Prissy Andrews so assiduously during school hours that he neglects all his other pupils.
Now I can understand why they didn’t want to fling themselves on that super creepy narrative grenade, but nonetheless it means that “Mr. Phillips is secretly gay!” is a bizarre reading totally at odds with the narrative and shows how little respect they have for the book. Like, if you want to have a secretly gay character, Matthew is right there.
I mean you could also argue that Matthew might well be asexual, but that almost certainly would not get the shocked, shocked! reactions that the creators are clearly yearning for, whereas secretly gay totally would. So.
I have more complaints - I could honestly go on about this almost indefinitely - but I’m going to cut myself off before my head explodes. How could they get literally everything so wrong?
