Well, Wednesday Addams is finally getting her own star vehicle in a new live-action television series from Netflix. And in a particularly awkward (though not-at-all surprising) move, said show will be directed by Tim Burton.
Why awkward, you ask? Well, Tim Burton’s strengths as a director of the weird and macabre aside, he’s been very vocal defending his choices to have largely white casts because, to his mind, “things either call for things, or they don’t”. So don’t count on talent the likes of Storm Reid or Quvenzhané Wallis to take up the title role, no matter how badly we would love to see it.
Here is Netflix’s announcement via Twitter:
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Are you ready for the best Wednesday ever? A Wednesday Addams live action series following the spooky icon’s coming of age is coming to Netflix. And with it, Tim Burton will be making his TV directorial debut! pic.twitter.com/rKQ7oZU645
— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) February 17, 2021
I’ve got a gripe here on Netflix’s end because they list this as Burton’s “TV directorial debut”, which it is emphatically not. Burton’s very first directing credits (outside several short films) were in television; a Hansel and Gretel special for Disney, along with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Faerie Tale Theatre. That last one was dearly important to me as a child, as Burton directed their version of Aladdin, which starred none other than Robert Carradine, Leonard Nimoy, and James Earl Jones. It was a nerd culture cornucopia, as it were.
There’s another angle on this, which is… why a coming-of-age story? We’ve seen teenage Wednesday before, and there was another route this could have gone—one that saw an adult Christina Ricci reprise the role that made her a household name, now as a woman in her forties. No one’s tackled that story yet. No official word on the casting yet, but given how sadly awful the last Addams film was (the animated one from 2019, not the gems we got in the 90s), this might be a slight improvement?
Wednesday is my favourite Addams! Looking forward to this. Any idea when it might be available?
I’m not sure I’m ready for Johnny Depp as Wednesday Addams.
“one that saw an adult Christina Ricci reprise the role that made her a household name, now as a woman in her forties.”
My household would love this, especially if it turns out Joel, her boyfriend from the second film, is alive and well and her husband.
You should check out Melissa Hunter’s Adult Wednesday Addams shorts on YouTube. They’re hilarious. It’s too bad she had to stop making them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD5fBjKwgEQ
CBR has more specifics:
https://www.cbr.com/wednesday-tim-burton-addams-family-netflix/
Uhh… huh? Wednesday strikes me more as the type to be coolly amused by a monstrous killing spree than attempting to thwart it. And Gomez and Morticia would find being embroiled in a supernatural mystery to be great fun.
Omg this sounds sooo cool
@5
Depending on the monster doing the killing, and who the targets were, she might help. Or at least try to divert the authorities.
“Is Hollywood dead?”
“Does it matter?”
@7/wiredog: Heck, in the top picture of this article, you can see behind Wednesday that she and Pugsley have a habit of stealing warning signs, so even as children they were deliberately trying to get people killed. There was some very dark humor in those films, as indeed in the original cartoons. The ’60s sitcom downplayed the macabre elements quite a bit.
This is…extremely odd.
First of all, I’m hard put to imagine a less plausible creative team-up than the Gough/Millar combine and Tim Burton. The Gough/Millar track record is in ensemble work both in front of and behind the camera, whereas Burton’s reputation is as a one-man band. And while the Burton trademark tone is arguably a good fit with the sideways-Gothic Addams Family worldview, the vibe of the typical Gough/Millar vehicle is on another wavelength entirely.
The descriptions of the series premise also sound confused. “Coming-of-age comedy” takes in a lot of territory – we might be looking at anything from Breakfast Club to the Melissa Joan Hart version of Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch, with the latter being a great deal closer to the right neighborhood for an Addams project. But the plot summary – “supernatural-infused mystery” etc. – reads as running on a track right alongside the CW’s current Nancy Drew series (which has rapidly morphed into a cross between Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I don’t think this mixture is compatible; it’s more likely to blow up like one of Uncle Fester’s less successful experiments.
Specifically, I’m worried about inconsistencies in the underlying logic. For all their Gothic trappings and macabre hobbies, the original TV Addamses were never overtly evil – indeed, quite the opposite; their ongoing challenge was to keep bad things from happening to the “normal” neighbors and house-callers who insisted on dropping in. More, what made the Addamses unique was that they embraced the occult world rather than fearing it – and were able to live comfortably with it on their own terms. I don’t know that you can introduce genuinely evil supernatural forces into an Addams universe (as the series plot precis suggests) without seriously compromising the integrity of the Addams worldview.
Finally, my sense of the original Wednesday was that she was – morbid fascinations notwithstanding – the smartest and most sensible of the entire family, with the possible exception of Morticia. I don’t want to see her character turned into a vehicle for teen-aged angst. I want to see her facing challenges head-on, nurturing her innate self-confidence, and growing into a role model for others whose interactions with the larger world run sideways to the norm.
I don’t think Gough, Millar, & Burton are going to tell that story – and frankly, I’ll be astonished if this project makes it to air with the announced creative partnership intact (if it does so at all).
@5- That’s the problems with the Addams Family as a mystery/thriller- most of the antagonists for such a thing would be welcomed with open arms by the family. The 90s movies skirted around this by inserting intra-family drama, setting the Addamses against preppy caricatures, and with the advantage of having Christina Ricci, who I believe may actually have been grown in a lab to play Wednesday, but it’s hard to maintain a serious tone of threat against a family who would probably congratulate you on successfully murdering them.
Personally, I’d like to leave behind the murders and mobs and see a gooey caramel hearted update of The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik from the first television series, where an antisocial wounded youth encounters the unquestioning support and enthusiasm of the Addamses and thrives under it, to the point that when his father tracks him down it makes him reconsider his whole parenting approach and try to actually understand his son’s interests and emotional needs.
@10/John C. Bunnell: “For all their Gothic trappings and macabre hobbies, the original TV Addamses were never overtly evil – indeed, quite the opposite; their ongoing challenge was to keep bad things from happening to the “normal” neighbors and house-callers who insisted on dropping in.”
Hmm, it’s ambiguous whether you can call the TV series “the original.” The original “Family” was in Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons, which were sometimes darker and more macabre than a ’60s sitcom was free to be, although it was the TV series that codified the character names and fleshed out their personalities and quirks. Often the cartoon family were fairly benign in their behavior — rooting for Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, feeling proud at a teacher’s letter about their son’s antisocial behavior, laughing at a horror movie — but sometimes there were darker cartoons, like Morticia asking a neighbor “May I borrow a cup of cyanide?” or the family preparing to dump boiling oil on Christmas carolers.
The Barry Sonnenfeld movies were an amalgam of both influences, but tended more toward the darker sensibilities of the original cartoons, recreating many of them outright; the films were played for laughs, but it was implied that the Addamses were into some pretty dark and murderous stuff offscreen.
Argh. My impaired vision is too poor to see black-and-white TV well, but I really should try to watch the original sitcom (before I try any subsequent part of the franchise). By all accounts, it’s the kind of thing I’d love. I just wish someone would adapt it into a bunch of books, which would be more user-friendly for me, but admittedly probably not as good.
@13 It is, among other things, an interesting look at the changing culture. For example, Gomez does Yoga, because in the sixties that was the sort of weird foreign vaguely occult thing that the Addamses were all about.