The Addams Family has taken many forms over the years, from the 1960s era TV show, to the 1990s big-budget movies, to a 2009 Broadway musical, and most recently as a two offbeat CG animated features, each shapeshifting to conform to—or, really, deviate from—the norms of the times. In the new Netflix series Wednesday, centered on the family’s ominous only daughter, the household of macabre bon vivants hews closer to the original design of cartoonist Charles Addams that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.
Behold Catherine Zeta-Jones as matriarch Morticia, Luis Guzmán as pater familias Gomez, Jenna Ortega as eponymous Wednesday and Isaac Ordonez as hapless brother Pugsly. Tim Burton is an executive producer and directed four of the eight episodes, helping to shape the overall look of the series. Perhaps the weirdest thing about the show, which will debut this fall, is that he hasn’t made an Addams Family project sooner.
For his first foray into television, Burton has brought along his longtime collaborator (and four-time Oscar winner) Colleen Atwood as costume designer to give Morticia her signature vampire chic and Gomez his fancy prisoner pin-stripes. Wednesday, who views the world in stark black and white, only wears the same—preferably with a razor sharp collar. Disheveled Pugsley is the only casual one in the clan, perpetually in short-pants and horizontal stripes that look like an old-school TV dialed to dead air.
Content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
The show is the brainchild of Smallville creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, who recruited Burton to bring his skewed sensibilities to the family of gothic outcasts. “He wanted the silhouette to look more like the Charles Addams cartoons, which is Gomez shorter than Morticia, versus the kind of suave Raul Julia version in the movies,” Gough says.
“He’s also incredibly debonair and romantic, and I think he has all those classic ingredients of the Gomez that we’ve seen come before, but he brings something also very different,” Millar added. “That’s something that was very important to the show—that it didn’t feel like a remake or a reboot. It’s something that lives within the Venn diagram of what happened before, but it’s its own thing. It’s not trying to be the movies or the ’60s TV show. That was very important to us and very important to Tim.”
Burton, who was not available for an interview, was famously pitched The Addams Family movie from 1991, but passed on it. Gough and Millar expected to get a no when they made their own plea. “Tim was always the Mount Everest of directors,” Gough says. To their surprise, Burton called them three days after receiving the script for the first episode.
“He was interested in where it was going, and the mystery of the show,” Gough says. “He had a lot of questions about the previous television work we’d done, and 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 45 minutes.”