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 ’s pilot script