When parents voice that perennial complaint — “Why can’t they make stories for children like they used to?” — a tale many have in mind is “Anne of Green Gables,” Lucy Maud Montgomery’s cherished 1908 novel about an exceedingly imaginative orphan. Now comes “Anne With an E,” a Netflix adaptation of the book that reports have described as darker and grittier than the original.

You say darker, I say richer.

Amybeth McNulty plays the title character in this series, which liberally enhances the novel and previously ran in Canada. (All seven episodes will be available on Netflix on Friday.) Anne is a 13-year-old who is mistakenly sent by her orphanage to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert (Geraldine James and R. H. Thomson), an aging brother and sister who had expected a boy to help out on their farm. Matthew, after initial dismay, warms to Anne, but the match seems doomed to fail because of the stern Marilla’s reaction.

“What good would she be to us?” she asks her brother.

He replies, “We might be some good to her.”

Anne is talkative to a fault and delightfully precocious; the contrast between her vocabulary and the vacuous drivel emitted by most teenage characters on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel is startling.

“It’s all very well to read sorrowful stories and imagine yourself living through them heroically,” she tells Marilla, “but it’s not so easy when you’re actually woeful, is it?”