My local library only has discs 1, 3 & 5 of season 2. I'm hoping to get 2 & 4 through interlibrary loan. Do any of the episodes build on each other in such a way that it would be helpful to watch the volumes in numerical order?
shareNot really. They do not need to watched in order. Have you seen season one? This is a great series!! Enjoy
shareI'm watching season 1 right now. I noticed that Christmas Party was the first episode that made reference to events from a previous episode (Door to Death). I'm just trying to avoid confusion if I can.
shareThey did that because it was also on the BBC in Europe and it was a two hour show over there so they sometimes did that to make the epicsodes have some reason to be together in a two hour show. There are some like that in season two but they will be on the same disc. so just view them in order on the single disc and you should be ok.
shareAll of the stories of Rex Stout can be understood without reference to previous stories. However, some of his books were written as a continium of short stories and occasionally he uses characters that he has introduced in previous books. The plots are consistant and coherent if they are taken in order, but Nero Wolfe (the novels, or the TV series) is not a soap opera. Each story has a plot stands alone very nicely without reference to previous stories. Watch the series and read the books. They go together very well.
I forgot to mention that on one of the discs is behind the scenes information. There is also the 2 hour movie called "the Golden Spiders" that was made in 2000. This movie was so well received that A & E decided to make Nero Wolfe a series.
shareThank you for mentioning "Golden Spiders," HuttonFan -- I was going nuts trying to find any confirmation online that the role of Saul Panzer had been recast after the first episode. But it turns out that IMDb has that pilot listed separately, as a TV movie, rather than as an episode of the series. So my recollection was correct -- in Spiders, Saul is played by (appropriately enough) Saul Rubinek, but in the series he's played by Conrad Dunn, and Rubinek played Lon Cohen, which I thought worked a bit better all round.
Other than that, the regulars stayed the same throughout.
In response to the original question, note that the A&E episodes are not AT ALL in the same order as Rex Stout's original stories (written between 1933 and 1974, though the stories used by A&E were all written between 1938 and 1966). We have the complete DVD set. The episodes on disc 1 are based on stories written in 1958 and 1965; disc 2 from 1949, 1952, and 1959; disc 3 from 1939, 1948, and 1956; disc 4 from 1954 and 1966; disc 5 from 1958, 1961 and 1962; disc 6 from 1944, 1946, and 1960; disc 7 from 1946, 1950, and 1955; and disc 8 (the pilot) from 1953 -- and the only reason I've listed the years sequentially within each disc is that I copied this information from my chronological list of Stout's stories.
As others have said, there may be an occasional reference to prior stories, but if so they will be explained well enough that you don't need to have seen the prior story already.