Wednesday: Netflix show isn’t a remake, more like an 8 hour Tim Burton movie

In the 90s, Tim Burton passed on the opportunity to direct The Addams Family movie adaptation of the famed 60s TV show based on the comic strip. Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld would take the reigns, but the visual aesthetic and macabre humor seemed ripe for Burton.

Things have come full circle as Burton is now executive producing and directing the new Addams Family series, Wednesday, for Netflix. The trailer was recently dropped along with promotional stills. The showrunners, Miles Millar and Alfred Gough sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair for the first-look release.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Miller explained that their goal was not to make this show “feel like reboot or a remake.” Instead, they tried to make it “an eight-hour Tim Burton movie.” Miller added, “It’s something that lives within the Venn diagram of what happened before, but it’s its own thing,” he continues. “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, as stated before, seemed like a perfect match for this material, having directed such comedies as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. He seemed almost unattainable for the project, but to their surprise, Burton called Miller and Gough after reading the script for the first episode. 

“He was interested in where it was going, the mystery of the show,” Gough explained. “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 45 minutes.”

With the release of the cast stills, fans of the franchise were quick to note the absence of a main character. It was that of Uncle Fester, who was portrayed by Christopher Lloyd in the movies. “We have no comment on Uncle Fester,” Gough says. “Watch the show.”

Wednesday is set to premiere on Netflix in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Are you excited? Which is your favorite incarnation of the franchise?