Wednesday’s New Addams Family

The Addams Family has changed a lot over the years, from a TV show in the 1960s to big-budget movies in the 1990s to a Broadway musical in 2010 and two weird CG-animated movies in the last few years. The changes were all to fit the times, or really to go against them. In the new Netflix show Wednesday, which is about the family’s scary only daughter, the macabre “good-for-nothings” is more like how cartoonist Charles Addams first drew them in The New Yorker.

Look at Catherine Zeta-Jones as the family matriarch Morticia, Luis Guzmán as the family patriarch Gomez, Jenna Ortega as the main character Wednesday, and Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley, the brother who always ends up in trouble. Tim Burton is an executive producer, and he also directed four of the eight episodes, which helped shape how the whole series looked. The show will start airing this fall. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that he hasn’t made an Addams Family project before.

Burton’s first real move into television was with the help of his longtime collaborator, four-time Oscar winner, and costume designer Colleen Atwood. She gave Morticia her signature “vampire chic” look and gave Gomez his “fancy prisoner” pinstripes. Wednesday only sees things in black and white, so she only wears those colors, preferably with a sharp collar. Pugsley is the only one in the clan who never looks neat. He always wears short pants and horizontal stripes. It makes him look like an old TV that is turned off.

Miles Millar and Alfred Gough came up with the idea for the show:

Smallville’s creators, Miles Millar and Alfred Gough came up with the idea for the show. They asked Burton to bring his weird ideas to the family of gothic outcasts. “He wanted the silhouette to look more like the Charles Addams cartoons, in which Gomez is shorter than Morticia, rather than the cool Raul Julia version in the movies,” says Gough.

“He’s also very slick and romantic, and I think he has all the classic Gomez traits, but he also brings something very different and new to the table,” says Millar. “It was very important to me that the show didn’t feel like a remake or a reboot. However, it fits in the Venn diagram of things that have happened before, but it is still its own thing. It doesn’t try to be like the movies or the TV show from the 1960s. That was very important to us, and Tim felt the same way.

Burton was not available for an interview. The 1991 Addams Family movie was pitched to him, but he turned it down. When Gough and Millar made their own case, they thought they would be turned down. Gough says, “Tim was always the Mount Everest of directors:”. Burton called them three days after he got the script for the first episode. This came as a surprise to them.

“His interest is in where the show was going and how it would end,” says Gough. Burton asked us a lot of questions about the TV work we had done before, like how we did it. He really liked that you spent time with Wednesday and got to know the character. 

Millar says that the goal of the show was to make it like an eight-hour Tim Burton movie.

The murders that happen in the small town where Wednesday lives before she goes to Nevermore Academy, a prestigious boarding school for outcasts, are the series’ mystery. Death and decay don’t bother her at all. They are actually soothing at a time when she is learning to live on her own.

Now Wednesday is a senior in high school:

Wednesday is no longer a sad little girl, which is one way the show is different from the old Addams Family stories. She is now a senior in high school. She is still sad, but she is more independent. “Wednesday’s relationship with Morticia is the kind of relationship that hangs over the season,” says Gough. “How do you step out of the shadow of a mother as beautiful as Morticia?”

Even though they are dark and scary, the members of the Addams Family have always been happy and enthusiastic. This is a lot for Wednesday to handle. “She isn’t afraid of sharks or spiders or anything else, but she is afraid of feeling,” says Gough. “Wednesday can’t stand how much they show they like each other.”

She and her brother also love and hate each other in Ortega’s story. He’s mostly nice, but he gets picked on and bullied by people who don’t like him. “It’s okay for her to hurt him. “No one else is,” says Millar. “That’s what makes the difference. She will protect him from bullies or anything else until the end, but she can do whatever she wants. She looks out for him in a very Wednesday-like way.”

“Every family is strange, but this one is very strange, but they love each other,” says Millar. “And in the end, that’s what it’s all about: They always have each other’s backs, and that’s what love is all about.”

Uncle Fester is the only person in the family photo who stands out as being missing. He’s not here. Who is going to play him?

That will stay a secret for a little while longer. Gough says, “We have nothing to say about Uncle Fester.” “Don’t miss the show”.

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