Corfu in the 1930s
TV's chronological snobbery
Several years ago, my wife and I started watching The Durrells in Corfu, a Masterpiece Theater series that first ran in 2016-2019. The series is based on the lives of Louisa Durrell and her four children, who moved to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935, several years after the death of her husband. One of Louisa’s sons, the nature writer Gerald Durrell, reminisced about his childhood in his Corfu Trilogy. Gerald’s brother, Lawrence, was a best-selling novelist, poet, travel writer, and translator, who also wrote about his family.
The television series follows the adventures and misadventures of the Durrell’s life on Corfu. They live in a decaying house, without electricity, at the edge of a crystalline sea. Leslie keeps everyone fed by hunting, and later joins the Corfu police force. Sitting all day in underwear and bathrobe, Larry pecks away at his typewriter, writing novels. Margo is boy-crazy one moment, dreams of becoming a nun the next, then clumsily stumbles from job to job. Gerald spends his days exploring the island with Theo Stephanides, a local naturalist and doctor, collecting a small zoo at the Durrell home. None of the children do much to keep the family solvent, and Louisa scrapes together a few drachmas by selling English pastries at the Corfu town market and later by opening a guest house. A family of strong-willed and unique individuals, the Durrells quarrel incessantly, but they’re held together by tenacious family loyalty and the manipulations of their determined mother.
John Milbank has observed that all TV dramas today are about cops or doctors because law and medicine have become our cultural religions. We no longer believe in God or any other transcendent good, so our moral dilemmas and decisions have been reduced to law and physical survival. The Durrells in Corfu is a family comedy-drama and, for that reason alone, it’s refreshing, charming, and funny, with well-defined, strong characters, who are likeable as long as you can stomach the family traits of irresponsibility and immaturity.