Maury Chaykin is excellent as Nero Wolfe, and the Nero Wolfe house set is wonderful. The actor who played Fritz is also good, and the repertory-theatre-style "ensemble" cast of people like Kari Matchett, who come back playing different roles in each episode is a novel idea for TV but it works surprisingly well.
There are two versions of this, the USA version and the International version. The "international" versions are a hundred miles better than the shorter USA versions and contain most of the charm of the series, such as the "gravy" episode with Fritz.
I tried reading the original Nero Wolfe novels but I'm not a fan of those and was not interested at all, so I have no comment about how close this comes to the original stories.
Timothy Hutton also produced the series, and so I assume he's partly responsible for casting himself as Archie Goodwin.
Hutton is hopelessly unable to play an intimidating tough guy, and the quite frequent scenes where Hutton is required to "act tough" make me cringe with embarassment.
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