Nero Wolfe: Season 01  (2001)

Theatrical Release Information:
Nero Wolfe: Season 01

Introduced on March 5, 2000, with the two-hour cable movie The Golden Spiders, the A&E series bearing the blanket title A Nero Wolfe Mystery launches its first season with Maury Chaykin as the corpulent, bombastic, sublimely self-indulgent title character and Timothy Hutton as Wolfe's wisecracking assistant and legman Archie Goodwin. Running anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, the individual episodes are inspired by the many Nero Wolfe novels and short stories written between 1934 and 1975 by Rex Stout, and all are ample demonstrations of the keen deductive and analytical skills of the overweight protagonist, who specializes in solving seemingly unsolvable crimes -- but only when he feels like doing so. The series' first three episodes are two-parters, all based on Rex Stout's original novels. "A Doorbell Rang" finds Wolfe accepting a case which implicates the FBI in cold-blooded murder; "Champagne for One," directed by series regular Timothy Hutton, focuses on the curious "suicide" of an unwed mother at a fancy dinner party; and "Prisoner's Base" has Wolfe not only exposing a scheme to steal a fortune by hook or by crook, but also clearing Archie of a charge of impersonating a police officer. Following three self-contained hour-long episodes, the series offers another two-parter to close the season, Over My Dead Body," centering upon a sinister fencing academy and a young woman who may or may not be Nero Wolfe's long-lost daughter. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide