Netflix Sets Premiere Date For Tim Burton’s ‘Wednesday’

NetflixNFLX
has announced a premiere for Wednesday, Tim Burton’s live-action Addams Family series. The series will be available on streaming Wednesday, November 23. Netflix also released key art of the series.

The series stars Jenna Ortega as the titular Addams and will focus on her high school years. The coming-of-age comedy was written by Smallville creators Al Gough and Miles Millar. The series also stars Gwendoline Christie, Jamie McShane, Percy Hynes White, Hunter Doohan, Emma Myers, Joy Sunday, Naomi J Ogawa, Moosa Mostafa, Georgie Farmer, and Riki Lindhome. Christina Ricci, who notably played Wednesday Addams in the 1991 Addams Family film and its 1993 sequel, is also in the series playing a character named Marilyn Thornhill.

The series is a departure from the usual take on the Addams Family, focusing not on the family but on Wednesday at school, however, the family will appear in guest starring roles. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán and Isaac Ordonez play Morticia, Gomez and Pugsley Addams.

“Wednesday is currently a teenager, and we’ve never seen her as a teenager before. Her snarky, snide remarks might not necessarily sound as charming when they’re coming from somebody who should probably know better than a 10-year-old girl. That was a balancing act,” Ortega explains. “We didn’t want to make her sound like every other teenage girl, but we also didn’t want to make her too ignorant. And we’ve never seen her on screen this much. Any other time you’ve seen Wednesday, she’s been the one-liner, the end of a joke, she always hits it, and I think that’s what people really love about her. But in this show, every scene is Wednesday. There’s an opportunity to give her a bit more dimension, and she becomes a bit more of a real person, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”

Burton executive produces Wednesday with Gough and Millar, who serve as showrunners. The studio is MGM Televison.

The Addams Family started as a comic strip by Cartoonist Charles Addams. The comic strip was first published by the New Yorker in 1938 and ran for over 50 years. The comic was turned into a sitcom in 1964 and later into two live-action films in the 1990s. There have been both live-action and animated TV reboots and a Broadway musical. Most recently, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has released two animated Addams Family films.