Showrunners have opened up about Netflix’s upcoming Wednesday TV series, saying it’s not an Addams Family reboot because they were moving towards something new.
Scream actress Jenna Ortega portrays a new take on Wednesday Addams in Wednesday, a new spooky series coming to Netflix just in time for this year’s Halloween, however, no specific release date has been announced.
Wednesday is a reimagining of The Addams Family within a lens that has never been explored before, with a specific focus on the only daughter in the strange family.
On Tuesday, Netflix and Variety unveiled an official image of the iconic family as they will be seen in the series.
Showrunners Miles Millar and Alfred Gough shared a little bit about what to expect and teased what Wednesday will be like. The two emphasized that they did not approach the project looking at it as a reboot or a remake of The Addams Family, but that they wanted to tell a Tim Burton story that spans quite a bit longer than the usual length of a film, and this one just happens to feature the Addams Family characters.
Millar shared “The ambition of the show was to make it an eight-hour Tim Burton movie.”
The Iconic Tim Burton
The show has been developed in collaboration with the legendary Tim Burton who makes his first ever series directorial debut by helming four of the show’s eight episodes.
The iconic director was the “Mount Everest of directors” on the wish list of directors that the showrunners wanted onboard the project, especially after he famously passed on the opportunity to direct the original live-action feature film.
After checking out the pilot script, Burton took just three days to get back in touch, and the team was delighted to hear that he seemed stoked about the idea and the series.
Gough shared, “He was interested in where it was going, the mystery of the show. He had a lot of questions about the previous television work we’d done, like how we were able to achieve it. He really loved that you had time to be with Wednesday and explore the character and you didn’t have to, you know, wrap things up in an hour and forty-five minutes.”
Nothing More Important Than Family
The new Addams Family is made up of Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzman as Gomez, and Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley.
Throughout all Addams Family adaptations, one thing has remained the same, and it is that family is the most important and they will protect each other no matter what. The Addams Family motto is ‘Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc’ meaning ‘We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us’ and although this iteration of the family isn’t a reboot or a remake, the family still matters most to them.
Millar spoke a little about the family dynamic, specifically the dynamic between Wednesday and Pugsley, and how she does tend to torture her brother but is also fiercely defensive of him, refusing to let school bullies or anyone else treat him that way.
“She’s allowed to torture him. Nobody else is. That’s the difference. She will defend him to the end against bullies or anything else, but she has license to do what she wants. She’s very protective of him in a very Wednesday way. Every family is weird, and this one happens to be extremely weird, but they love each other. And that’s ultimately what it’s about: They always have each other’s backs and its unconditional love.”
