A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2001-2002)

Good but Hutton is miscast

Maury Chaykin is excellent as Nero Wolfe, and the Nero Wolfe house set is wonderful. The actor who played Fritz, Colin Fox, 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 versions and the International versions. The "international" versions, which are the ones with all the cooking scenes retained, are a hundred miles better than the shorter USA versions. The "international" versions contain most of the charm of the series, such as the "gravy" episode where Fritz makes spaghetti "with gravy" for the gangster who's to provide Nero Wolfe with cuts of meat, or the scenes of Wolfe and Fritz quibbling over the number of juniper berries to add to a recipe.

Sadly the only ones which are on DVD as far as I know are the USA editions, with most of these fun parts removed.

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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