DEAR DEAD DAYS
WEDNESDAY ADDAMS IS BACK, BUT THIS TIME SHE’S DITCHING THE FAMILY AND HEADING TO BOARDING SCHOOL FOR NETFLIX’S NEW MURDER-MYSTERY SERIES WEDNESDAY
WORDS: STUART MANNING
AFTER 50 YEARS ON-SCREEN, THE creepy, kooky Addams Family are off to conquer streaming. But rather than family-based farce and morbid puns, Netflix’s Wednesday spins the deadpan Addams child off in her own series, grappling with life at boarding school amid a series of macabre murders.
“We were looking for a character to build a TV series around and thought of Wednesday Addams,” explains showrunner Alfred Gough, who co-created Wednesday with longtime writing partner Miles Millar. The pair performed a similar trick on The CW’s Smallville, which reimagined Superman for a teen audience. “The Addams Family has remained in the cultural consciousness for decades and Wednesday’s become kind of a meme. She’s the character in The Addams Family that we always liked the most. So our thought was, ‘What if she was a teenager? And what if she stepped outside the family?’”
FAMILY VALUES
Gough and Millar developed Wednesday’s pilot script back in 2019, packing the character off to the ominous Nevermore Academy, following an unfortunate incident involving a high school water polo team and a bag of piranhas. Nevermore is a school for “outcast” children with special abilities… handily so, since Wednesday has begun to suffer from troubling psychic visions.
“We had choices… do we keep her in the real world at a regular high school?” recalls Gough. “We talked about that, but then we figured that we still wanted this to feel like an Addams Family show. It felt like we needed to create that gothic vibe in a new environment.”