Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This BBC reproduction re-imagines what Fr Brown would be like if he never quoted from, or sounded like, GK Chesterton. It is Chesterton without Chesterton -- not weak tea but rather lukewarm water with no tea at all. It is a flavorless exercise in pointlessness -- a work of fiction with the marks of true existential meaninglessness as its primary hallmarks done in Chesterton's name. It is almost as if the creators are con artists executing a dopey frame job. The show needlessly transports the titular character from a time that resembles our own to post-war Britain for absolutely no reason other than precluding any possibility to use Chesterton's prophetic wit as a foil to the very issues we grapple with today. This is a Father Brown who never talks like Father Brown, never says anything Chestertonian, and thinks little of his own faith. He is easily silenced by a cultist's facile comparison of Catholicism to his own deceptive ramblings, angered by trivial matters, gluttonous, surrounded and henpecked by an all-female lay hierarchy, and never possessed of the gift of penetrating insight. In short, this is Father Brown as he would be written by Modernists who are shamefully unaware of who Chesterton is, what he stood for, and how he stood for it. Not only is this Father Brown without the mind of Chesterton, at least once an episode he says something antithetical to the fictional priest or the flesh and blood writer. "Don't worry, I won't try to convert you," he promises a homosexual atheist in the very first episode. (Note: the issue of homosexuality is shoehorned into the first episode because the agenda must be followed, apparently.) Excuse me? When was Father Brown NOT interested in converting those he met? He never let the idle lies of Modernists and atheists drop without a devastating retort delivered with his usual unassuming aplomb. But he was always interested in defending his faith and leading others to it. It was central to his whole demeanor. The series bears little similarity to Chesterton's stories. The mysteries are dull and surprisingly un-mysterious. Details are needlessly altered, tensions are disappointingly dumbed down and philosophical/ideological/theological differences, rather than serving as portals to the characters' souls, are papered over. You would think that even in the fifties there are still plenty of opportunities for our priest protagonist to drop the occasional Chestertonian observation or clever retort and there are. The problem is, this Father Brown never says them. When confronted he rises to the occasion by speaking only in dull one-liners that could have been penned by an atheist teenager. This is the real terrible crime (but alas not a mystery, Brits hate God). Chesterton took great pains to understand the thinking and worldview of his opponents, be they atheists or Adventists, and illustrate how the ideologies animate his characters. Yet these writers demonstrate a patent inability to enter the mind of a devout and confident Catholic. This does a disservice to adherents of any philosophy, must less Chesterton's belief system. And it is embarrassing to see a production done in his name by pretenders who clearly have not read a single word of his work. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," the Kenneth More Fr Brown would say, "this will never do."