Nero Wolfe

RAI did a great job transplanting Nero Wolfe from NY to Rome. The show Italianizes Rex Stout's characters, but it had to for the characters to fit into their new venue, and for the Italian audience to relate to the characters. The change in the stories is also a temporal change. Stout created Nero Wolfe in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression. The Italian adaptation takes place in 1959. Stout created Wolfe as a fantasy for his Depression-era readers. Wolfe was wealthy and was able to obtain justice at a time when the readers were mostly poor and unable to remedy the many injustices around them. The RAI version doesn't allow Wolfe to function that way. The Italianized Archie Goodwin is more sophisticated and suave than the Stout version. Wolfe's cook is no longer Swiss but is the marvelous Italian chef, Nanni Laghi. Archie has an on-again off-again romantic interest in the newspaper reporter, Rosa Perini, with whom he maintains a light-hearted and pleasant flirtation. In summary, very well done. It helps if you can follow in Italian. The subtitles are sometimes lacking.