'Wednesday': Netflix Releases First-Look Photo of Addams Family Series
Netflix finally released the first photos of Wednesday, the highly-anticipated Addams Family series from Tim Burton. The new series is centered on Morticia and Gomez's daughter, played by You star Jenna Ortega and will be released this fall. It is the latest adaptation of Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons and looks to hew closer to his original designs than previous series and movies. The new photos come after Netflix shared a brief teaser in June.
The main cast also includes Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzman as Gomez, and Isaac Ordonez as Wednesday's brother Pugsley. Burton is an executive producer on the series and directed the first four episodes. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville) created the series.
Millar and Gough recruited Burton for the project, and he brought in his longtime collaborator Colleen Atwood to design costumes that better reflected Charles Addams' work. "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 told Vanity Fair, which published four Wednesday photos.
Guzman's version of Gomez is a mix of the previous iterations of the character, but he brings "something also very different and new," Millar said. "That's something that was very important to the show... that it didn't feel like a remake or a reboot," he told Vanity Fair. "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."
Wednesday sounds like the perfect project for Burton, who passed on the chance to direct the hit 1991 movie about the Addams. Gough and Millar expected Burton to turn down the property again. However, he called them back after he received the script for the pilot. He was instantly interested in the "mystery of the show," Gough said, as well as the idea that he didn't have to wrap up the story in 105 minutes. "The ambition of the show was to make it an eight-hour Tim Burton movie," Millar explained.
Wednesday finds the titular Wednesday Addams older than she had been depicted in the past. She attends Nevermore Academy, a school for outcasts. The mystery begins when several people are murdered near the school. The central relationship for Season 1 is between Wednesday and Morticia, but it also explores the love-hate relationship Wednesday has with Pugsley.
There was one surprising omission from the photos Vanity Fair published. Uncle Fester was nowhere to be seen! "We have no comment on Uncle Fester," Gough told the magazine. "Watch the show."