FINALLY!  I watched “White Out,” the first two episodes of the “Three Pines” series.  I doubt that I will watch any more.  I was really disappointed — mostly that Louise Penny had endorsed it so heartily.  (But then her last book was a bit of a departure, too.  Maybe she is through with Inspector Gamache et al.)

Mostly — I disliked the characters in the TV episodes — there wasn’t a single one who appeared as I had envisioned.  Not even Rosa, the duck!  (Too big.)  Who was that svelte, neat Clara, for instance?  Surely not the distracted artist with bits of food or paint in her hair and wearing an old raggedy sweater or paint-daubed flannel shirt!  And Myrna?  Wrong size entirely!  Not the woman who sinks clear to the floor on Clara’s old, sprung couch cushions because of her immensity?

And I can’t even begin to talk about Jean Guy, Armand, and Reine Marie — where was the chemistry between them — the years of family relationships honed by threats of unimaginable magnitude?  They seemed distant, polite, but not at all as Penny wrote them.  Maybe Peter, Clara’s husband, was close to her depiction, but we never really got to know him anyway…

But worst of all — the village!  Three Pines!  Where the hell was it?  In fact, where were the three pines which are supposed to be standing sentinel in the village common?  Where was the peacefulness?  The friendliness?  The relationships between the residents?  And why was this village, always depicted as nestled around the central commons — why was the village so sprawling and non-cohesive?  As a matter of fact, why was the Bistro so loud — Penny pictured it as cozy, friendly, a good place to talk and renew oneself, often busy but never 21st century LOUD!  I wonder if the director or script-writers or any of the cast had even read the books.

I guess there was a reason I put off watching this for so long.  (I needed to gather my strength!)  As I’ve often said, there is only one film adaptation of a book that I felt really depicted what I “saw” as I read it.  That was “To Kill A Mockingbird.”  The movie was exactly what I had seen in my head — Harper Lee’s words in 3-D!.  In all other instances, I’ve been disappointed but never as much as in this TV depiction of “Three Pines.”

Perhaps, partly, it’s because of the trip five of us took some years back to the Eastern Townships where we explored the places Penny had used as inspiration for her books. Any one of the villages that we visited could have been a better backdrop for Three Pines.