No franchise is ever really dead. The latest to be resurrected is the Addams Family, which now takes the corporeal form of a TV show, Wednesday, about the high school years of the Addams’ solemnly psychopathic daughter, the trailer for which has just been released. Is this just the last gasp of an IP that needs, finally, to be laid to rest, or is there a reason to be genuinely excited this time? In a gloomy grey typeface, the trailer offers us a lifeline: “From the mind of Tim Burton.” OK. Like one of the Addams’ long-lost mutant cousins, we’re all ears.
Based on Charles Addams’ long-running cartoons in The New Yorker and brought to a wider audience through the 1960s TV show, modern audiences may be most familiar with the delightful gothic family – wasp-waisted matriarch Morticia, moustachioed husband Gomez, hapless son Pugsley and devil-in-pigtails daughter Wednesday, plus a cortege of ghoulish friends and relations – thanks to the Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film adaptation that landed in the '90s.
It's hard to believe that Burton, who is an executive producer on Wednesday and will direct half of the eight episodes, hasn’t been involved with the Addams Family before (he has come close: he passed over the opportunity to direct the ‘90s films owing to previous commitments and a stop-frame animation version in the 2010s never happened). The director’s sensibilities – black humour, playful gothic aesthetics, as evinced in beloved classics from Beetlejuice to Edward Scissorhands – seem perfectly suited to the source material. But there’s one visual force that might overwhelm his own: Netflix.
Because despite those credentials this looks undeniably like a Netflix production. In the trailer we watch Wednesday Addams (played by Jenna Ortega, giving off sweeter vibes than her predecessor, the imperious Cristina Ricci, who will appear in the series too), as she embarks on a new academic start at Nevermore Academy.
Wednesday, we are told, has rattled through eight schools in five years, and a nasty incident involving a team of water-polo jocks and a plastic bag of hyperactive piranhas appears to be the final straw. Will heading off to the “alternative” school where her parents met set Wednesday right? Hmm, I wonder.
The streaming giant’s aesthetic is less celebrated than Burton’s, though you’re definitely familiar with it, and it’s in full evidence here. Saturated colours, fairly standard camera set-ups; everything appears to pop in a straightforward way. You'd be forgiven for watching the Wednesday trailer and thinking, "this looks like a Netflix joint" rather than jumping to the Burton of it all.
It goes beyond visuals. Many Netflix shows seem similar because they're about similar things. Netflix is the unrivalled home of high school dramas. Some are rom-coms with regular human children like Never Have I Ever and Heartstopper. But there’s also the one about superheroes (The Umbrella Academy), the one where film noir meets American suburbia (Riverdale), the one for witches (Sabrina), the one with beautiful, murderous Spanish students (Elite) or the one about coastal class tensions (Outer Banks).
It doesn’t help that many of the stars of Wednesday seem to exist on a Netflix carousel. Ortega's biggest gig before this one was on Netflix stalker drama You. Gwendoline Christie (playing headmistress Larissa Weems) just showed up on The Sandman, another Netflix blockbuster where a visually distinctive source material was flattened somewhat by the streamer’s parameters. (On a casting tip, it seemed impossible to imagine a better Morticia than Anjelica Houston, but actually, bagging Catherine Zeta-Jones for this one could be inspired.)
Of course, this is just a two-minute trailer. It would be foolish not to have faith in Burton, and Netflix is still capable of producing distinctive content. There’s a chance that Burton will be able to play with tonal contrasts (both mood and actual colour) in a way that he enjoys: for example the pastel, Netflixy shades of Wednesday's initial school, the deliciously named Nancy Reagan High School, contrasted with Nevermore’s darker tones (which in turn might recall the juxtaposition of Edward Scissorshands and his white-picket-fenced neighbours).
We’ll have to wait and see when Wednesday drops in the autumn – the spookiest time of the year – to judge whether the director’s idiosyncrasies can prevail against the streamer’s sensibilities. Here’s hoping we have another Burton classic on our hands.
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
