The 2022 TV series “Wednesday,” created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, is a modern update of the Addams Family, characters featured in a series of ghoulish comic strips that first appeared in the pages of the New Yorker in 1933. Over the decades, the Addams Family characters were given their own sitcom, a few animated shows, and multiple theatrical features and TV movies, not to mention comic books, video games, and pinball machines.
The myth of the Addams Family has remained consistent throughout: The Addams are a loving, healthy family whose values only happen to be a complete dark mirror of ordinary people’s. The Addams Family love death, bleakness, and misery. They regularly commit murder, and seem to be immortal. And yet, they love everything they do. The family patriarch Gomez is enthused and sexually devoted to his wife Morticia. The young daughter Wednesday is a classic Goth kid, and happy to harm her brother Pugsley.
The new “Wednesday” series ages the character up from her usual elementary school age to her teenage years. It follows Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) into Nevermore Academy, a school for monsters and weirdos, where she discovers eerie conspiracies. (She also kills other students, although that seems to happen a lot at Nevermore.) Tim Burton serves as the executive producer on “Wednesday,” and he directed the first four episodes.
The first season of “Wednesday” aired in November 2022, and Netflix is busy assembling a second season, although no official airdate has been announced. The series has many fans, and they have loved the new, updated version of “The Addams Family.” Indeed, some have wondered if the version of the Family seen in Gough and Millar’s series will ever be adapted into a theatrically released feature film. The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Gough recently, however, and he threw some water on that hopeful flame. He admitted that he and the other “Wednesday” showrunners aren’t looking in that direction at all.
No, ‘Wednesday’ will not be a movie
To date, there have been five feature films starring the Addams Family. Barry Sonnenfeld directed two live-action films in 1991 and 1993 (called “The Addams Family” and “Addams Family Values”), and Dave Payne continued that same continuity with a mostly-new cast in the 1998 straight-to-video sequel “Addams Family Reunion.” Then in 2019 and 2021, MGM released a pair of animated Addams films (called “The Addams Family” and “The Addams Family 2”). Despite the volume of Addams media, some have wanted “Wednesday” to add a sixth feature to that list. Alfred Gough, however, says he has no plans to make that happen. He would rather keep the action on the small screen:
“We feel like we explore ‘The Addams Family’ in this show, through Wednesday. So, this is the story. When we did ‘Smallville,’ people always asked if we were going to do a Superman movie. But that was the story we were telling. I think that’s how we feel here. There are a lot of stories to tell in this universe, and we’re excited to do that.”
For those unaware, “Smallville” told the story of a young Clark Kent before he moved to Metropolis to become Superman. It was about the excitement and intrigue of his upbringing, and not about the fully-formed Superman. It seems that Gough wants to explore the intrigue of a teen Wednesday Addams, and not use his show as a jumping-off point into something expected and familiar.
In a bit of an update, Gough also revealed that the second season of “Wednesday” is about half-completed, currently shooting in Ireland. Gough, his partner Millar, and star Jenna Ortega also had to take a break from “Wednesday” to write and act in (respectively) Tim Burton’s latest feature film “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” currently in theaters. To quote The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love,” I don’t care if Monday’s blue, Tuesday’s gray … but “Wednesday” is coming back.