And she practiced her smile until it was perfect

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is an amazing series, and you can watch it right now

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One of the best things available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service is Jim Henson’s “The Storyteller” series and its second series, “The Storyteller: Greek Myths”. They were two joint American/British productions made in 1988 and 1990, and they’re both wonderful.

It’s entirely possible that I was aware of them when they were coming out, but I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate them then, anyway. I would’ve lumped it in with all of the other non-Muppet releases from the Henson company, like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal: clearly full-to-bursting with imagination and craftsmanship, but they always left me cold. But where “The Storyteller” is different is that the stories truly are the focus; they don’t feel like just excuses to string together a bunch of creatures and effects.

Another key difference is that the series was developed by Anthony Minghella, and he wrote the screenplays for the first series, based on traditional folk tales. And the scripts are wonderful; he gets the cadence of the language and the spirit of the stories exactly right. (The title of this post is a perfect line from “The Three Ravens.”) It took a few episodes for the fairy tales to grow on me, but each one I’ve seen makes me appreciate the others more.

I started with the Greek Myths series, which is still my favorite. These are brilliantly narrated by Michael Gambon, and the whole production is skewed to that perfect level of non-quite-dark but not-quite-happy, not-quite-adult but not-quite-childish that the Henson company has (almost) always done so well. Even though I’d heard most of the stories before, they all added aspects of the myth I hadn’t heard, or presented them with such a level of drama that it felt as if the stories were being told for the first time. (I hadn’t heard any of the fairy tales stories before, so they were all new to me).

There’s more info about the series at Muppet Wiki and Wikipedia; I’d say just watch them and enjoy the feeling that you’ve unearthed a classic you had no idea existed. I was going to say that people just don’t make television like this anymore, but it’s actually worse than that: I can’t even imagine who would even have the idea to make something like this these days.