Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.

I had something else planned originally, but when I got out of DRILLBIT TAYLOR today, the first thing I wanted to do was get home and throw on my DVD of some of Anthony Minghella’s work on THE STORYTELLER, a Jim Henson series that I dearly love.

“When people told their past with stories... explained their present with stories... foretold their future with stories... the best place by the fire was kept for... The Storyteller.”

Before Minghella was known as a producer or a director, he made his bones as a working screenwriter. I haven’t seen GRANGE HILL, one series he wrote for, or any of his other early episodic work, but when NBC aired this strange and ambitious anthology show in 1987 and 1988, I was hypnotized by it. I have a long-standing fascination with the way we’ve bastardized fairy tales and folk stories over the years, the way we’ve sanitized them, and I admire anyone who makes an effort to preserve or understand these stories in their original form.

Minghella was the sole screenwriter on the nine episodes, and his work is literate, witty, and graceful. I’m sitting here watching “Sapsorrow” right now, and even his exposition is handled with keen intelligence. There were a number of different directors on the show, like Steve Barron and Jon Amiel, as well as Henson himself, but there was one unifying style to the entire series, and a big part of that was because of the creative choices made by Minghella. I love that they didn’t use any of the big standard fairy tales, but you can see similarities between these stories and stories you’re more familiar with, like “Sapsorrow” and “Cinderella,” for example. More than that, you can see how there are similarities in all of these stories, like the way three is always used as a number of importance or the way prophecy never quite plays out the way you might expect. It’s smart stuff, but it’s also (and this is something that seems mandatory in a show called THE STORYTELLER) just plain good storytelling. These are engrossing tales, and these may well stand as the definitive modern tellings of most of them, since I can’t imagine anyone else trying again anytime soon or bettering Minghella if they do try.

I liked his work as a writer/director quite a bit, and I love THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY and TRULY MADLY DEEPLY in particular, but tonight, it was watching THE STORYTELLER that most made me appreciate just how much he loved the very act of telling a story. The fairy tales themselves in THE STORYTELLER are compelling, but what makes the series special is the host material, featuring John Hurt as The Storyteller and Brian Henson as his dog. Hurt tells the stories to the dog, and in subtle, wonderful ways, they interact with the stories a bit. It’s an obvious device, but it’s a great showcase for Hurt, and it might be my favorite puppet work by Brian Henson ever. The dog is sarcastic at times, but he gets deeply emotionally invested in the stories, reacting with anger or sorrow when he feels like the story has betrayed him, or when he’s too upset by some character’s fate. All storytellers love to interact with their audience to some extent, and the brilliance of what Minghella does here is that he tells you a story, he shows you how wonderful it can be to tell that story, and he gets to insert the audience’s reactions right into the fabric of the piece.

Made in the verrrrrry early days of digital post-production, THE STORYTELLER was as cutting-edge as anything on TV in terms of how it was made at the time. Looking at it now, it’s held together more by scotch tape and good intentions than anything else, and that dated quality may hurt your chances showing it to very young kids who won’t see the sort of gloss and polish they’re used to with most stuff they watch now. But the quality of Minghella’s writing here... as with most everything he touched... is what guarantees that these versions of these stories, as told by this storyteller, will endure.

Here are some lovely extracts from the series, courtesy of YouTube:

I love how blunt and no-nonsense the writing in this one is, how Minghella doesn’t waste a single word, especially at the start, and I think it’s a beautiful image that carries you from Hurt to the story itself at the very start.

That opening is so cool. I wish this series had run long enough to see them redo that a few seasons in, a little slicker, the way the TWILIGHT ZONE openings got more polished over time.

The approach to storytelling in “Hans My Hedgehog” is so much warmer and more personal than in “Sapsorrow” above that it’s hard to believe the same writer adapted both stories. And I love how they use the puppets in this episode. Nothing cute about it. It’s practically ERASERHEAD at one point.

I highly recommend you pick this one up if you don’t already have it. These nine episodes are all worth revisiting, and I’m glad I was able to enjoy them today.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles